Fifteen minutes before water from a flooded stream swept into her home, Lilia Ramirez took off running with what little she could carry.
When she returned she found not only damage from the water that had flooded her first floor to the ceiling but the oil it had carried streaking her walls.
Poza Rica is an oil town and among the challenges confronting some residents who fled flooding that killed at least 64 people in five states and left 65 missing is residue from the oil that built this city not far from the Gulf of Mexico.
Authorities say torrential rains and flooding have damaged nearly 100,000 homes across the region.
“Never before has it been tarred before like that,” Ms Ramïrez said on Monday, standing in her devastated ground floor where walls that had once been pink were now vertically striped with black.
Mexico has deployed some 10,000 troops in addition to civilian rescue teams. Helicopters have ferried food and water to nearly 200 communities that remain cut off by ground and carried out the sick and injured.
“There are sufficient resources, this won’t be skimped on … because we are still in the emergency period,” president Claudia Sheinbaum said during her daily press briefing on Monday.
But on some streets in Poza Rica, 275km northeast of Mexico City, the cleanup of mud and debris was complicated by thick oil deposits on trees, roofs, and vehicles tossed by the current that swept through Friday.
Parts of Veracruz state received 62.7cm of rain from 6 to 9 October.
Ms Ramirez said that at other times of heavy rain, the state oil company Pemex had drained nearby areas with oil to avoid it spreading.
Roberto Olvera, one of her neighbours, said a siren from a nearby Pemex facility alerted them to danger.
“It was a really anguishing moment because a lot of people from the neighbourhood stayed behind and some perished,” he said.
Pemex said in a brief statement to the AP that so far it did not have reports of an oil spill in the area.
Ms Sheinbaum acknowledged it could be days before access was established to some places.
“A lot of flights are required to take sufficient food and water” to those places, she said.
The president denied that government systems had failed to provide sufficient warning. “It would have been difficult to have had much advance knowledge of this situation, it’s different from with hurricanes,” she said.
Mexico’s Civil Protection agency said the heavy rains had killed 29 people in Veracruz state on the Gulf Coast as of Monday morning and 21 people in Hidalgo state, north of Mexico City. At least 13 were killed in Puebla, east of Mexico City. Earlier, in the central state of Queretaro, a child died in a landslide.
Authorities have attributed the deadly downpours to two tropical systems that formed off the western coast of Mexico and have since dissipated, Hurricane Pricilla and Tropical Storm Raymond.
