OSTUACAN, Mexico (Nov. 6) - Survivors saw relatives swept away by huge waves or buried by debris after a landslide hit a rain-swollen river, triggering what officials called a “mini-tsunami” that wiped a hamlet off the map and left at least 16 people missing.

Residents of San Juan Grijalva told The Associated Press on Monday they had been awakened by a rumbling roar and the sound of rocks rolling down from surrounding mountaintops on Sunday night, almost a week after massive flooding sent rivers over their banks in the southern Mexican states of Chiapas and neighboring Tabasco.

“It was a roar, like a helicopter was passing overhead,” recounted farmer Domingo Sanchez, 21. “We didn’t know what was happening, and then we went outside, and there were cracks opening the earth,” he said, apparently recounting the initial collapse of a nearby hillside into the river. “We ran up the hill … but soil kept coming down on us.”

For the next several hours, Sanchez, his mother, his wife and a cousin fought for their lives in a valley where the only salvation lay in getting to higher ground.

Sanchez reached a hilltop just in time to look across the valley and see a landslide cover the home of his grandparents. He believes at least nine of his relatives were buried.

San Juan Grijalva, 45 miles southwest of Villahermosa, is near the border of heavily floo

ded Tabasco state and linked to the same river systems. The landslide was the latest damage caused by a week of flooding and heavy rains that has left 80 percent of Tabasco under water, destroying or damaging the homes of about half a million people. At least 20,000 people remain trapped on rooftops across the state.

David Sanchez, 22, a cousin of Domingo, described the events he saw from his house in a different part of the village that once was home to about 600 people.

source: AOL news

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