(The following story by James Young appeared at ICIS.com on July 8, 2010.)
MEXICO CITY — Rain from a tropical depression compounded earlier flooding in northern Mexico caused by Hurricane Alex, closing rail lines and disrupting chemical traffic, officials said on Thursday.
While the earlier storm largely bypassed petrochemical interests in Altamira, Tampico and Reynosa in the state of Tamaulipas, a number of mudslides and accidents hampered rail traffic into and around Monterrey, Mexico’s third largest city and a northern hub of industrial activity.
Spokespersons from the nation’s Communication and Transportation Secretariat (SCT) in the three affected states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas and Coahuila confirmed a force majeure declaration for much of the Linea B rail line operated by Kansas City Southern de Mexico (KSCM), running from Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo.
The line’s three trouble spots are 967-1,137 km (601-707 miles) into the country in the worst-hit state of Nuevo Leon.
As of Wednesday, KSCM had reported four accidents on the line since the storm passed, one causing the deaths of three passengers riding illegally.
Another accident took place on Linea RD, a line run by Ferrocarriles de Mexico (FerroMex) from Coahuila’s Texas border to Escalon, Chihuahua. The Coahuila SCT office said traffic may not resume until 12 July.
Nuevo Leon’s SCT spokesperson said that while most traffic could be re-routed around the Linea B closures via roads, key roads linking Monterrey to Saltillo, another key industrial centre, were completely shut for the time being.
Rail traffic was also suspended on the so-called Linea M, operated by FerroMex, which runs from Gomez Palacio, Durango, the site of numerous industrial parks, to the Gulf port of Tampico. This was due to flood damage between Linares and Montemorelos, Nuevo Leon, at kilometre 360, the office said.
The flooding was causing an estimated 30% hike in regional train shipment costs, with companies forced to invoke contingency plans for diverting containers from trains to trucks to circumvent blockages, said Eduardo Aspero, president of the Mexican Intermodal Transportation Association. He was speaking at an industry event this week.
Along the US-Mexico border, the Rio Grande was said to be at a dangerous flood stage. Officials were forced to release water from one of the five key dams in the region, notably sacrificing the town of Anahuac, Nuevo Leon, 70 km southeast of border town Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.
While officials had closed the region’s international bridges dedicated to foot and surface traffic, the SCT’s Tamaulipas office confirmed that the two bridges in the region dedicated to train traffic at Nuevo Laredo-Laredo and Matamoros-Brownsville were both operating normally for the time being.
The spokesman added that the Nuevo Laredo authority was observing a pileup of cars coming out of Mexico into Laredo, Texas, with US trucks unable to transfer cars quickly enough.
The key issue now for the border will be the rains associated with what has been dubbed Tropical Depression Two by the US National Hurricane Center.
The storm, which nearly became Tropical Storm Bonnie, is set to bring 2-8 inches (5-20 cm) of additional rain to the already saturated Rio Grande Valley, putting further pressure on the river’s strained levees and dams.
Mexico’s state-run oil giant Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) has a number of facilities in the affected areas, but had so far avoided significant damage, officials said.
So far, the effects on plastics sales and volumes would not be immediately felt because of inventories, a market source in Mexico City said. However, the source did not rule out possible disruptions in the future.
Nonetheless, flooding in south Texas caused by last week’s Hurricane Alex and the tropical depression was expected to significantly delay US rail shipments of both dry and liquid chemicals into Mexico, a US ethanol supplier said.
The producer said the hold-up could last at least 30 days. The source was considering the option of sending material into Mexico by trucks instead from terminals across Texas.
The 35 mile/hour (56 km/hour) tropical depression made landfall on Thursday morning near the southern end of South Padre Island, Texas, forecasters said.
On Wednesday, three of Union Pacific’s railroad crossings – at Brownsville, Eagle Pass and Laredo, Texas – were reported closed because of flooding and washouts caused by Alex, according to Raquel Espinoza, spokeswoman for the railroad company.
The El Paso crossing was open, she added.
A plastics trader who knew of the closings said on Wednesday the closures could last until the weekend or even the middle of next week, delaying US petrochemical exports to Mexico.
Impacts from the storm were felt throughout the Texas Gulf Coast. The Houston Pilots, the largest ship pilot organisation in the region, said they were not boarding any vessels under 20,000 tonnes. Houston is the petrochemical hub of the US.
But the Galveston-Texas City pilots group said they were boarding without restrictions.