There are times when the Rio Grande is little more than a trickle running through a concrete ditch separating Mexico and the US.
This week was not one of them.
The remnants of Hurricane Alex unleashed torrents of rain over northeastern Mexico, in what Mexican President Felipe Calderon called the worst storm “in recent memory” in the region. The rain broke records in some areas and floodwaters poured into rivers, inundating towns and shutting down border bridges.
The storm killed at least 30 people, according to local newspaper reports. Among the dead was Jose Manuel Maldonado, the mayor of Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. He and four other people died when their light plane crashed on Wednesday as they were surveying the flood zone.
Across the region, people scrambled to safety on their rooftops, packed up their belongings ahead of advancing floodwaters and piled into shelters. Helicopters rescued people who had waited too long to evacuate, and soldiers piled sandbags on one of the international bridges between Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas, as rising floodwaters lapped at the edge.
Jesus Luebano, the secretary of the Mexican section of the International Boundary and Water Commission, which oversees the Rio Grande river basin, said that the region had received more rainfall in recent days than during Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, a storm people still talk about.
“We are talking about something truly extraordinary,” he said.
Commerce between Mexico and the US was hampered by the storm. Collapsed bridges shut down the highway between Monterrey, Mexico’s industrial capital, and the main border crossing at Nuevo Laredo on Friday. The governor of Tamaulipas State, which contains Nuevo Laredo, said it could take three to four days to reopen the road, a major interruption.
Parts of the seven-month-old highway between Monterrey and the auto manufacturing city of Saltillo were also closed by mudslides. On Thursday, the rising Rio Grande forced officials to shut two of the border crossings between Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, backing up trucks for kilometers.
More rain in northeastern Mexico was expected this weekend from a tropical depression.
In Monterrey, rains at the beginning of the month brought the city to a standstill. In a matter of days, the city had received more rain than it typically would receive over the whole year.
Along the Rio Grande, the waters rose to their highest levels in decades. The flow into the Amistad dam, near Ciudad Acuna in Coahuila State and Del Rio, Texas, was the highest since 1974, Luebano said.
A waterlogged wing of the century-old town hall in Linares, in Nuevo Leon, collapsed in seconds.
Los Salteadores de Linares, a Mexican norteno country music group, wrote a “corrido” ballad to Hurricane Alex ending with a warning: “Listen well, authorities,” the final verse began. “Don’t get your shoes all muddy for publicity photos. Get to work.”
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