Crocodiles infest Mexico as death toll rises to 80 and more landslides hit Acapulco

Flooding has forced residents to wade through dangerous waters as Tropical Storm Manuel is upgraded to a category one hurricane

The death toll from twin storms in Mexico continues to rise as the US National Hurricane Center upgraded Tropical Storm Manuel to a category one hurricane over Mexico's coast early Thursday.

Residents have been wading through crocodile infested waters and pictures have emerged showing people battling with one crocodile in the city centre.

It is now approaching north-western Mexico and could produce 75 mph winds and between five and 10 inches of rain over the state of Sinaloa.

Reports of floodwaters pulling crocodiles into the centre of Acapulco and new reports of landslides in a nearby village also begin to emerge.

Mexico officials raised the death toll to 80 after devastating storms led to massive landslide smashing through a tiny coffee-growing village deep in the country's southern mountains, where fresh waves of rain threatened to unleash more danger for rescue workers trying to evacuate the last residents from the isolated hamlet.

58 people remain missing. Federal officials said they were not yet declaring the 58 dead in the village of La Pintada several hours north of Acapulco, but it appeared unlikely that they had survived.

“It's very likely that these 58 missing people lost their lives,” Angel Aguirre, governor of storm-battered Guerrero state, told reporters.

Mexico's federal Civil Protection coordinator, Luis Felipe Puente, said 35,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.

The storm that devastated Mexico's Pacific coast over the weekend regained strength Wednesday and became Hurricane Manuel, dumping rain on fishing villages on the coast of Sinaloa state. It is a third blow to a country still reeling from the one-two punch of Manuel's first landfall and Hurricane Ingrid on Mexico's eastern coast.

Residents trying to return to their homes by wading through waste high waters are being met with looters.

Heavy rains also began pelting the state of Guerrero again Wednesday night, increasing the risk for federal police trying to evacuate the last 45 residents of the village of La Pintada, where tons of dirt and rocks smashed through the center of town Monday night, burying a church and an untold number of two-story homes.

Federal authorities reached La Pintada by helicopter and evacuated 334 people, some of whom are hurt, one seriously, said Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong,

This handout photo taken and released on September 18, 2013 by Mexico's Interior Ministry press office shows an aerial view of a landslide along a highway going to Acapulco, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, as heavy rains hit the country. (AFP)

Osorio Chong said there was a risk of more landslides for the federal police who stayed in the village overnight and hoped to leave with the last 45 residents on helicopters early Thursday morning.

He said the landslide went right through the middle of the village of some 600 people, accessible in normal conditions by winding mountain roads now broken multiple times by landslides and flooding.

In Acapulco, three days of torrential rain and leaden skies evaporated into broiling late-summer sunshine that roasted thousands of furious tourists trying vainly to escape the city, and hundreds of thousands of residents returning to homes devastated by reeking tides of brown floodwater.

A man uses a surfboard to cross a flooded street in Acapulco (Reuters)

The depth of the destruction wreaked by Manuel, which first hit Mexico Sunday as a tropical storm, was highlighted when the transportation secretary said it would be Friday at the earliest before authorities cleared and reconnected the parallel highways that connect this bayside resort to Mexico City and the rest of the world.

Hundreds of residents of Acapulco's poor outlying areas slogged through waist-high water to pound on the closed shutters of a looted Costco, desperate for food, drinking water and other basics.

“If we can't work, we have to come and get something to eat,” said 60-year-old fisherman Anastasio Barrera, as he stood with his wife outside the store.

With a tropical disturbance over the Yucatan Peninsula headed toward Mexico's Gulf coast, the country could face another double hit as it struggles to restore services and evacuate those stranded by flooding from Manuel and Ingrid, which hit the Gulf coast.

Elsewhere in the verdant coastal countryside of the southern state of Guerrero, residents turned motorboats into improvised ferries, shuttling passengers, boxes of fruit and jugs of water across rivers that surged and ripped bridges from their foundations over the weekend.

In Acapulco's upscale Diamond Zone, the military commandeered a commercial center for tourists trying to get onto one of the military or commercial flights that remained the only way out of the city. Thousands lined up outside the mall's locked gates, begging for a seat on a military seat or demanding that airline Aeromexico honor a previously purchased ticket.

“We don't even have money left to buy water,” said Tayde Sanchez Morales, a retired electric company worker from the city of Puebla. “The hotel threw us out and we're going to stay here and sleep here until they throw us out of here.”

Mexican officials said that at least 10,000 people had been flown out of the city on 88 flights by Wednesday evening, just part of the 40,000 to 60,000 tourists estimated to be stranded in the city.

“Forty-eight hours without electricity, no running water and now we can't get home,” said Catalina Clave, 46, who works at the Mexico City stock exchange.

Additional reporting by agencies