The depth of the destruction wreaked by Manuel, which first hit Mexico Sunday as a tropical storm, was highlighted when the transportation secretary said it would be Friday at the earliest before authorities cleared and reconnected the parallel highways that connect this bayside resort to Mexico City and the rest of the world.
Hundreds of residents of Acapulco's poor outlying areas slogged through waist-high water to pound on the closed shutters of a looted Costco, desperate for food, drinking water and other basics.
Many paused and fished in the murky waters for anything of value piling waterlogged clothing and empty aluminum cans into plastic bags.
“If we can't work, we have to come and get something to eat,” said 60-year-old fisherman Anastasio Barrera, as he stood with his wife outside the store.
With a tropical disturbance over the Yucatan Peninsula headed toward Mexico's Gulf coast, the country could face another double hit as it struggles to restore services and evacuate those stranded by flooding from Manuel and Ingrid, which hit the Gulf coast.
Mexico's federal Civil Protection coordinator, Luis Felipe Puente, said 35,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.
Elsewhere in the verdant coastal countryside of the southern state of Guerrero, residents turned motorboats into improvised ferries, shuttling passengers, boxes of fruit and jugs of water across rivers that surged and ripped bridges from their foundations over the weekend.
In Acapulco's upscale Diamond Zone, the military commandeered a commercial center for tourists trying to get onto one of the military or commercial flights that remained the only way out of the city. Thousands lined up outside the mall's locked gates, begging for a seat on a military seat or demanding that airline Aeromexico honor a previously purchased ticket.
“We don't even have money left to buy water,” said Tayde Sanchez Morales, a retired electric company worker from the city of Puebla. “The hotel threw us out and we're going to stay here and sleep here until they throw us out of here.”
Mexican officials said that at least 10,000 people had been flown out of the city on 88 flights by Wednesday evening, just part of the 40,000 to 60,000 tourists estimated to be stranded in the city.
A lucky few held up ransacked beach umbrellas against the sun. Temperatures were in the mid-80s but felt far hotter. Dozens of others collapsed in some of the few spots of shade.
“Forty-eight hours without electricity, no running water and now we can't get home,” said Catalina Clave, 46, who works at the Mexico City stock exchange.
