Video Updates on Flood Damage in the Mexican State of Oaxaca

Update | Wednesday | 8:11 a.m.: Late on Tuesday night, after rescuers were finally able to reach a remote village where Mexican officials said hundreds of homes had been buried in a mudslide, they found that the situation was not as bad as had been feared.

Ulises Ruiz, the governor of the state of Oaxaca, told The Associated Press, “So far no one is confirmed dead, only 11 missing who we hope… will be found.”

The Mexican newspaper El Universal explains that initial reports from an official in the town had suggested a much larger tragedy and heavy rains had prevented flights over the town to confirm the scale of the damage for many hours.

Original Post | 6:11 p.m. As my colleague Elisabeth Malkin reports, as many as 300 houses may have been buried in a landslide in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

According to the state’s governor, up to 1,000 people could be trapped beneath mud and rocks in the village of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, where a rain-soaked hill collapsed early Tuesday. Santa María Tlahuitoltepec is a center of the Mixe Indian culture in the mountains about a four-hour drive from the state capital under normal conditions. (This YouTube clip of the town, uploaded in 2008, shows that it is perched on steep hillsides.)

Although there is no footage yet available from the remote village where the mudslide took place, reporters from E-consulta Oaxaca, a local news Web site, have been using Qik.com, a video-streaming service, to upload video from their phones showing the damage and disruption caused by rain and floods in the region.

Qik allows live video updates to be posted online, directly from phones, and then archived, next to a map showing where the video was recorded.

Journalists for the Mexican news site have already posted more than 20 short clips on Tuesday showing some of the damage caused by the heavy rain.

When live updates are available, they stream automatically on both the E-consulta page on Qik and on the news site’s home page, next to the latest headlines. The updates are then archived both on Qik and on the news site’s YouTube channel.

Diego Saturno García, a reporter with E-consulta, told The Lede that video is being transmitted by a team of reporters using phones that can send live images to the Web. Although most of the video posted so far has been shot near the city of Oaxaca, later on the site hopes to have video taken from helicopters of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, the worst-affected area.

He adds that reporters, like rescue workers, “are having serious problems” just trying to get to that village and that the cell coverage is generally poor there.

Even viewers who do not speak Spanish can get a sense of the impact of the rain and the potential danger from the video reports showing swollen rivers and flooded streets. Viewers who speak Spanish can watch several interviews with residents and officials responding to the emergency.