Hurricane Dean closed in on the Mexican mainland Wednesday, battering evacuated oil platforms on the Bay of Campeche and threatening to regain some of the force it unleashed on the Yucatan Peninsula. Dean swept across the Yucatan on Tuesday after making landfall as a ferocious Category 5 hurricane. toppling trees, power lines and houses _ but sparing Glitzy resorts on the Mayan Riviera. Driving rain, poor communications and impassable roads made it difficult to determine how isolated Mayan communities fared in the sparsely populated jungle where Dean made landfall after killing 13 people in the Caribbean, the Associated Press reported. Greatly weakened from that overland journey, Dean moved across the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf of Mexico, home to more than 100 oil platforms, three major oil exporting ports and the Cantarell oil field, Mexico's most productive. The entire field's operations were shut down just ahead of the storm, reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas. The sprawling, westward storm was projected to slam into the mainland Wednesday afternoon near Laguna Verde, Mexico's only nuclear power plant, which is suspending production. At 0900 GMT (5 a.m. EDT), Dean was a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 130 kph (80 mph) and was centered about 280 kilometers (175 miles) east-southeast of Tuxpan, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. It was moving west-northwest at about 32 kph (20 mph). Torrential rains, battering waves and a storm surge of six to eight feet (1.8 to 2.4 meters) above normal were forecast, and some strengthening was possible over the warm waters of the Gulf before landfall.
