At least 11 dead after Agatha hit Mexico

More than 40,000 people in the state have been affected, primarily along the coast and in the mountains just beyond, Governor Alejandro Murat said Wednesday.

Agatha was the strongest hurricane since records have been kept to come ashore in May in the eastern Pacific.

It made landfall Monday afternoon on a sparsely populated stretch of small beach towns and fishing villages as a strong Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 170 kph, but it quickly lost power moving inland over the mountainous interior.

Even as Oaxaca continued to search for the missing and clean up downed trees and flooded homes, Mexican officials were watching another large area of thunderstorms along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan Peninsula that forecasters said could become a tropical storm later this week.

The US National Hurricane Centre gave the system a 70 per cent chance of becoming a tropical depression in the next 48 hours. As it took shape, it dumped heavy rain on southern Mexico and Belize.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Defence Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval was headed to Oaxaca to oversee recovery operations.

Australian Associated Press