Dean VS. Mexico Round 2 Oil Industry Hit Hard

VERACRUZ, Mexico, Aug. 22 Hurricane Dean was over the Bay of Campeche headed for landfall near Veracruz, Mexico, early Wednesday after raking the Yucatan peninsula.TECOLUTLA, Mexico (AP) - Hurricane Dean
closed in on the Mexican mainland Wednesday, battering evacuated oil
platforms on the Bay of Campeche while regaining some of the force it
unleashed on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Veracruz state Gov. Fidel Herrera said more than 10,000 people had been
evacuated from coastal cities such as Tuxpan ahead of the storm's
expected strike in the early afternoon and schools were closed
statewide.

Dean swept across the Yucatan on Tuesday after
making landfall as a ferocious Category 5 hurricane, toppling trees,
power lines and houses—but sparing glitzy resorts on the Mayan Riviera.

Driving rain, poor communications and impassable roads made it
difficult to determine how isolated Mayan communities fared in the
sparsely populated jungle where Dean made landfall after killing 13
people in the Caribbean.

Greatly weakened from that overland journey, Dean moved across the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf of Mexico, home to more than 100 oil platforms, three major oil exporting ports and the Cantarell oil field, Mexico's most productive.

The entire field's operations were shut down just ahead of the storm,
reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion
cubic feet of natural gas.

Seventy percent of the oil city of Ciudad del Carmen was flooded
Wednesday morning, Campeche state Gov. Jorge Carlos Hurtado told
Mexico's Televisa network.

The sprawling, westward storm was
projected to slam into the mainland Wednesday afternoon near Laguna
Verde, Mexico's only nuclear power plant, which is suspending
production.

At 8:00 a.m. EDT, Dean was a Category 1 hurricane
with winds of 90 mph and was centered about 100 miles northeast of
Veracruz, Mexico, and about 120 miles Southeast of Tuxpan, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. It was moving west-northwest at about 20 mph.

That was up from winds of 80 mph a few hours earlier, but still far short of the wind strength it had at initial landfall.

Torrential rains, battering waves and a storm surge of six to eight
feet above normal were forecast, and some strengthening was possible
over the warm waters of the Gulf before landfall.

But the
center's hurricane specialist Daniel Brown said Dean was unlikely to
have enough time to strengthen beyond a Category 1 or 2 hurricane
before making landfall Wednesday afternoon. Outer bands of the storm
system reached the mainland before dawn.

The last tourists
departed Tuesday from the beaches of Tecolutla, a getaway on the
western Gulf of Mexico where the storm is forecast to hit.

Zbigniew Szadkowski, 50, a physics professor from Lodz, Poland, said he
wanted to see a hurricane in action but was leaving anyway with wife
Anna, 51.

"I wanted to stay but my wife said no," he said.

Residents boarded up doors and windows on hotels facing the beach, and
authorities issued stern warnings for the low-lying coast.

There were about 100 soldiers in the town who authorities said would be
used for security or evacuation if needed. Javier Sanchez, the head of civil protection in Tecolutla, said residents were being encouraged to leave and a forced evacuation was not being ruled out.

Dean became the third most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall
in recorded history when it plowed into the Yucatan Peninsula on
Tuesday.

"It wasn't minutes of terror. It was hours," said
Catharine Morales, 30, a native of Montreal, Canada, who has lived in
Majahual for a year. "The walls felt like they were going to explode."

Morales weathered the storm in her new brick-walled house with her
husband and 7-month-old daughter, Luna. Dean blew out the windows and
pulled pieces from their roof.

But they fared better than most: Hundreds of homes in the Caribbean town of Majahual collapsed as Dean crumpled steel girders,
splintered wooden structures and washed away about half of the immense
concrete dock that transformed the sleepy fishing village into Mexico's
second- busiest cruise ship destination.

The storm surge
covered almost the entire town in waist-deep sea water, said fishermen
Jorge Gonzalez, 29. He found refuge in the back room of a beachfront
store whose steel security curtains were blown out, and had to help his
dog Camilo keep his head above the rising tide.

"There came a moment when I thought this was the end," Gonzalez said.

President Felipe Calderon said no deaths were immediately reported in
Mexico, but little was known about the thousands who rode out the storm
in low-lying communities of stick huts.

Hurricane-force winds could strike as far north to La Cruz, about 200 miles south Texas, the hurricane center said.

Dean's projected path is 400 miles south of Texas, where only heavy
surf was expected. The space shuttle Endeavour landed a day early
Tuesday because of the threat NASA once feared Dean would pose to
Mission Control in Houston.

Dean was a Category 1 storm with sustained winds of 80 mph, less than half the windspeed of the Category 5 storm Dean was when it hit the Yucatan early Tuesday, forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

At 5 a.m., Dean was traveling west-northwest at 20 mph about 120 miles northeast of Veracruz and some strengthening was forecast before making landfall in that vicinity, forecasters said.

Dean was the third-most-powerful Atlantic hurricane at landfall, ranking behind the Florida Keys' 1935 Labor Day hurricane and Hurricane Gilbert in 1988.

Yet by Wednesday morning, no storm-associated deaths were reported in the Yucatan, a Palm Beach (Fla.) Post correspondent reported. Emergency officials and the military began scouring jungle areas and villages soon after Dean passed.

However, Dean was blamed for at least 13 deaths in Dominica, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique and St. Lucia.