Up to 1,000 people were feared dead after a waterlogged hillside collapsed before dawn Tuesday in southern Mexico, burying up to 300 homes as residents slept inside, local officials said. A strip of hillside about 200 meters (660 feet) wide collapsed above a group of some 100 to 300 homes in the state of Oaxaca, the state's governor Ulises Ruiz said.
He feared "between 500 and 600 people, they're talking about up to 1,000," may be dead in the disaster, Ruiz told local television station Televisa. The landslide occurred about 3:00 am (0800 GMT) in the town of Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec, officials said.
But more than six hours after the tragedy, rescue teams had yet to reach the scene in the mountains of Oaxaca, part of a wide area of Mexico devastated this year by what officials describe as the heaviest rains on record. "We have not been able to get there yet," Ruiz said. "We are moving Mexican Army personnel, rescue workers and health personnel" to the scene.
Donato Vargas, secretary of the town of some 10,000 people, told AFP that the neighbourhood of El Calvario was plunged into confusion and dread as residents sought for at least 400 people missing after the landslide. "We fear that the missing are buried inside their homes because they have searched the nearby places," said Vargas. The landslide is the latest weather-related disaster to befall a nation suffering from a relentless string of hurricanes, tropical storms and depressions that have slammed southern and eastern Mexico in the past several weeks, flooding cities, valleys, historic sites and broad stretches of farmland.
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