ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — The death toll in massive flooding in southern and central Mexico rose to 57 on yesterday as desperation mounted in the cut-off resort of Acapulco, where residents looted a store and thousands of exhausted, despondent tourists waited to be ferried out by air.

Gun-toting state police guarded the entrance to a Costco store in Acapulco, hours after people looted the partly flooded outlet on one of the city’s main boulevards, carting off shopping carts full of food, clothing, and in some cases flat-screen TVs.

Hundreds of people waded through waist-high brown water in the store’s parking lot yesterday, fishing out anything — cans of food or soda — that looters might have dropped. Others shouted for the now-shuttered store to be reopened.

“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. “The city government isn’t doing anything for us, and neither is the state government.”

Mexico was hit by the one-two punch of twin storms over the weekend, and Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said 57 storm-related deaths had occurred.

The country could get another double blow by week’s end. A tropical disturbance formed over the Yucatan Peninsula on the country’s eastern tip and Tropical Depression Manuel — the same storm that battered Acapulco — regained force in the Pacific. It was expected to hit Baja California on the country’s far west as a renewed tropical storm.

With the twin roads from Acapulco to Mexico City closed down, at least 40,000 tourists saw a long holiday beach weekend degenerate into a desperate struggle to get weeping children, elderly parents and even a few damp, bedraggled dogs back home.

Two of Mexico’s largest airlines were running about two flights an hour from Acapulco’s still-flooded international airport Tuesday, with priority for those with tickets, the elderly and families with young children.

Everyone else who couldn’t wait for the government’s promise to reopen the roads within two days flocked to Air Base 7, about 20 minutes north of Acapulco, where a military air bridge made up of barely more than a dozen aircraft ferried tourists to Mexico City. The normally quiet beachfront installation was transformed into a scene from a conflict zone.

Families in shorts and sandals waited for as long as eight hours outside the gates of the base, held at bay by rifle-toting soldiers until they were allowed to drag suitcases, pet carriers and red-eyed children across the tarmac, where they jostled furiously for a chance at one of the 150 seats on the next departing Air Force Boeing 727.

City officials said about 23,000 homes, mostly on Acapulco’s outskirts, were without electricity and water. Stores were nearly emptied by residents who rushed to stock up on basic goods. Landslides and flooding damaged an unknown number of homes.