The death toll rose to 47 Tuesday due to the combined impact of Tropical Storm Manuel and Hurricane Ingrid which hit Mexico almost at the same time.
Tropical Storm Manuel hit the beach resort of Acapulco on the western shores of Mexico's Pacific Coast, while Hurricane Ingrid battered the Gulf Coast over the weekend. Though Ingrid was a hurricane offshore, it weakened to a tropical storm as it made landfall.
Up to 60,000 tourists were stranded in Acapulco over the long holiday weekend after Manuel's rains flooded the airport and landslides blocked highways. On Tuesday, two of Mexico's largest airlines, Aeromexico and Interjet, began running flights to and from the still swamped international airport, reports USA Today.
Commercial carriers and the Mexican military set up flights ferrying tourists to a nearby concert hall instead of the terminal. Emergency flights began arriving in Acapulco to evacuate at least 40,000 mainly Mexican tourists stranded in the resort city where some streets were transformed into raging brown rivers.
Federal officials said it could take at least another day to open the main highway to Acapulco, which was hit by more than 13 landslides from surrounding hills, and to bring food and relief supplies into the city of more than 800,000.
The main coastal boulevard was open Tuesday and most hotels appeared to have power, water and food. But that was little consolation to those unable to leave.
The situation was far more serious in the city's low-income periphery, where steep hills funneled rainwater into neighborhoods of cinderblock houses. As a result, around 23,000 homes, mostly on Acapulco's outskirts, were without electricity and water.
Forecast guidance indicates the low will meander in the western Gulf of Mexico through late week. However, by this weekend an approaching southward dip in the jet stream across the central United States could help influence the direction the system, or its moisture, moves.
Although it's too early to speculate about exact details, there is the possibility that this tropical moisture could enhance rainfall along portions of the Gulf Coast and Florida this weekend into early next week, reports The Weather Channel.