Hurricane Alex sidelines effort to clean up oil

July 1, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

MIAMI

Forecasters say the first Atlantic hurricane of the season has made landfall in northeastern Mexico.

The Category 2 storm churning in the Gulf of Mexico has sustained winds of near 105 mph. The National Hurricane Center says it made landfall about 10 p.m. EDT Wednesday at Soto La Marina along the coast.

The storm is far from the Gulf oil spill, but cleanup vessels were sidelined by the hurricane’s ripple effects. Six-foot waves churned up by the hurricane splattered beaches in Louisiana, Alabama and Florida with oil and tar balls.

Hurricane Alex flooded roads and forced thousands of people to evacuate fishing villages.

It is moving west at about 10 mph. Late Wednesday, it was about 110 miles south of Brownsville, Texas.

Alex strengthened into a Category 2 hurricane with winds of 100 mph as it churned across the Gulf of Mexico, its rains already lashing Mexican fishing villages whose residents fled to the town of San Fernando on buses and in the back of pickup trucks.

Hundreds of people filled Engineer Abel Ramirez of San Fernando’s Civil Protection and Fire Department in Mexico said seven fishing villages, with a combined population of about 5,000, were being evacuated.

In Brownsville, more than 100 families took shelter in a high school,.

Alex spawned two tornadoes around Brownsville, including one that flipped over a trailer. No injuries were reported.

Officials also closed the causeway to South Padre Island, a popular vacation getaway off the Texas coast, and 9-foot waves were reported on the island’s beach.

It was the first June hurricane in the Atlantic since 1995, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Flash floods also forced hundreds of evacuations in the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, but hurricane specialist Eric Blake said those rains were only indirectly related to Alex and possibly the residual effects of Hurricane Darby, which has dissipated in the Pacific.

Three people, including a 5-year-old child, were killed when heavy rains and winds brought down a wall over their wooden house in Acapulco, state Civil Protection authorities said.