On Mexican Coast, Anxiety After Dean

CASITAS, Mexico, Aug. 22 -- Now, they wait. Wait and worry.

Each hour -- each minute, it seems -- Adalberto Simón feels the urge to peek at the choppy brown stream that flows behind the wrecked thatched-roof shack where he once slept soundly. The deep branch of the Bobos River that made his back yard beautiful now unnerves him.

"It looks ugly to me," said Simón, 19.

Soggy ground and small floods are part of life here amid the cattle ranches and tiny villages dotting the 300 winding miles between the important Mexican port cities of Tampico and Veracruz. But Hurricane Dean, the sprawling storm that took its second swipe at Mexico on Wednesday when it made landfall close to here, threatens something more -- to fill this region's myriad rivers and tributaries to overflowing.

This is the second, less flashy phase of a hurricane's assault, the slow-motion torture that contrasts with the adrenaline rush of a storm that Wednesday afternoon brought 100 mph winds to Simón's little slice of heaven, 100 miles north of Veracruz. Everyone, from Veracruz state's governor, Fidel Herrera, to the farmers in their hip boots, is watching the rivers.

No one knows for sure whether the waterways of this region will rise out of their channels to inflict further harm on homes, as well as on fields where banana trees snapped in half and cornstalks lay flat. But it is the abiding preoccupation of the moment. Dean has already shown that it can flood cities -- Ciudad del Carmen on the Gulf of Campeche was bailing water Wednesday, just as Chetumal on the Yucatan Peninsula did the day before -- and the people here in the countryside are wary that it may now be their turn.

"It got this high back in 1999," Simón said, lifting his hand to his chest.

For all the worries about channel-hopping rivers, Dean is still viewed in Mexico primarily as a catastrophe averted.

"The damage is less than originally expected -- thank God," Mexican President Felipe Calderón said after cutting short his summit in Canada to tour the storm-damaged Yucatan.

No deaths have been reported in Mexico, even though the storm hit the Yucatan as a Category 5 behemoth with 165 mph winds and was still a powerful Category 2 hurricane when it arrived here. The death toll in the Caribbean, though, rose Wednesday to 20 with the discovery of seven bodies in Haiti, where 3,000 were killed during Tropical Storm Jeanne in 2004. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Dean was expected to dissipate over Mexico's central mountains by early Thursday.

On Wednesday, even with the threat of more flooding, Dean remained on a best-case-scenario path through Mexico. After avoiding Cancun the day before, it slid halfway between Tampico, population 300,000, and Veracruz, population 444,000. The sparsely populated area where it made landfall Wednesday is known as Mexico's Emerald Coast, a place dotted by villages, cattle ranches, lonely beaches and breathtaking coves.

Mexico's only nuclear plant, Laguna Verde, lies well south of the spot where the hurricane struck with its greatest force and was undamaged. The storm also spared the Gulf of Campeche oil platforms operated by the state-run oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, which pays for more than a third of the country's budget.

Simón was fixated on more modest budget numbers: the pesos he and his older brother make by selling fish caught in the river that now threatens him. The Simón brothers, who ply the water in canoes just as their father and grandfather did, took over the family business last year after their father died of cancer.

Things were going well, until Dean. They had set up a small restaurant. Just eight plastic tables, but it was all theirs, no small feat in a region where many labor in someone else's fields.

Dean's winds and rain caved in the corrugated plastic roof that Simón installed himself. As he huddled inside, water rushed into the restaurant -- a place the Simóns named the Excellent Fishhouse -- and ruined the supplies he'd hoped to save.

But even as the remnants of Dean splattered raindrops on his head, Simón was clearing out the mess and making plans to build everything up again -- flood or no flood.