Dean Bears Down on Mexico's Oil Industry

Two couples look at the ocean as Hurricane Dean approaches the area in Cancun, southeastern Mexico, Monday, Aug. 20, 2007. Hurricane Dean spared the Cayman Islands the worst of its fury on Monday as it headed for a collision course with Mexico's resort-dotted Caribbean coast. (AP Photo/ Eduardo Verdugo) (Eduardo Verdugo - AP)

Veracruz has been Mexico's most famed Gulf port since the days of Hernan Cortez and is famed for its African-inflected music. Tampico, 260 miles up the coast, is a grittier port city, a center of Mexico's oil industry in its early days. Between the two is a land of fishing, farming and oil with a lush, palm-dotted shoreline, cut with rivers flowing into the usually placid Gulf of Mexico.

North of Veracruz is a strip of resorts known as the Emerald Coast, and seven more oil platforms are just offshore. Laguna Verde, Mexico's only nuclear power plant, is only 35 miles to the south, and hundreds of buses stood by to evacuate workers if necessary.

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 had once feared Dean would pose to Mission Control in Houston.

Calderon cut short a trip to Canada and traveled late Tuesday to some of the hardest-hit areas in southern Quintana Roo where he surveyed the damage and talked to some of the hurricane's victims.

Earlier in the day, standing by Calderon's side at a summit in Montebello, Canada, President Bush offered U.S. aid.

"We stand ready to help," Bush said. "The American people care a lot about the human condition in our neighborhood, and when we see human suffering we want to do what we can."

Dean was the third-most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall since record keeping began in the 1850s. It had a minimum central pressure of 906 millibars, the third-lowest at landfall after the 1935 Labor Day hurricane in the Florida Keys and Hurricane Gilbert, which hit Cancun in 1988.

"A very low pressure indicates a very strong storm," said meteorologist Rebecca Waddington.

The deadliest storm to hit Latin America in modern times was 1998's Hurricane Mitch, which killed nearly 11,000 people and left more than 8,000 missing, most in Honduras and Nicaragua.

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Associated Press writers contributing to this report included John Pain in Miami; Richard Jacobsen in Poza Rica, Mexico; Karla Heusner Vernon in Ladyville, Belize; Lisa J. Adams in Mexico City; and Michael Melia in San Juan, Puerto Rico.