CIUDAD ACUNA, Mexico — A tornado raged through a city on the U.S.-Mexico border Monday, destroying homes, flinging cars like matchsticks and ripping an infant away from its mother. At least 13 people were killed, authorities said.
CIUDAD ACUNA, Mexico — A tornado raged through a city on the U.S.-Mexico border Monday, destroying homes, flinging cars like matchsticks and ripping an infant away from its mother. At least 13 people were killed, authorities said.
In Texas, 12 people were reported missing after the vacation home they were staying in was swept away by rushing floodwaters in a small town popular with tourists.
A baby was also missing after the twister that hit Ciudad Acuna, a city of 125,000 across from Del Rio, Texas, ripped the child’s carrier from the mother’s hands and sent it flying, said Victor Zamora, interior secretary of the northern state of Coahuila.
Rescue workers dug through the rubble of damaged homes in a race to find victims. The twister hit a seven-block area, which Zamora described as “devastated.”
Mayor Evaristo Perez Rivera said 300 people were being treated at local hospitals, and up to 200 homes had been completely destroyed.
“There’s nothing standing, not walls, not roofs,” said Edgar Gonzalez, a spokesman for the city government, describing some of the destroyed homes in a 1-square-mile stretch.
By midday, 13 people were confirmed dead — 10 adults and three infants.
At least five people were unaccounted for.
Gonzalez said late Monday night that rescuers were looking for four members of a family who were believed missing, adding that there were still areas of rubble that remained to be searched.
In the U.S., a line of storms that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes dumped record rainfall on parts of the Plains and Midwest, spawning tornadoes and causing major flooding that forced at least 2,000 Texans from their homes.
Witnesses reported seeing the swollen Blanco River push a vacation house off its foundation and smash it into a bridge. Only pieces of the home have been found, according to Hays County Judge Bert Cobb.
One person who was rescued from the home told workers that the other 12 inside were all connected to two families, Cobb said.
The house was in Wimberley Valley, an area known for its bed-and-breakfast inns and weekend rental cottages.
Dana Campbell, a retired engineer who lives on a bluff above the river, said the floodwaters left behind damage that resembled the path of a tornado “as far as the eye can see.”
The storms were blamed for at least six deaths Saturday and Sunday in the U.S., with three in Oklahoma and three in Texas. A man’s body was recovered from a flooded area along the Blanco River, which rose 26 feet in an hour and created huge piles of debris.
Trey Hatt, a spokesman for the Hays County Emergency Operations Center, said Monday that teams had halted their search for the missing at nightfall. He said “the search component is over,” meaning that no more survivors are expected to be found in the flood debris, and added that recovery operations would begin today.