MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Central and southern parts of Mexico's Gulf Coast braced for flash floods and mudslides as Hurricane Karl closed in on the Mexican coast for the second time Friday.
Karl, building up its winds and bringing the potential of up to 15 inches/ of rain, was about 70 miles/ east-northeast of the city of Veracruz as of 5 a.m./0900 GMT, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
Karl's winds were up to 120 miles per hour/ as the storm moved across the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico, where the bulk of Mexico's 2.55 million barrels per day of oil is produced.
Karl, a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, was expected to make landfall Friday.
Mexico's oil industry had to scramble Thursday after Karl came across the Yucatan Peninsula into the Bay of Campeche.
State-run oil giant Pemex evacuated platforms in the path of the storm and halted production at 14 minor wells, the company said in a statement that did not detail how those measures would disrupt production.
Two of Mexico's main oil exporting ports closed as Karl passed through the region.
Karl seemed unlikely to inflict lasting damage however and oil prices fell more than 2 percent as traders focused instead on the expected resumption of a major Canadian pipeline.
Storms in the Bay of Campeche have the potential to cause serious disruption to Mexican oil output but rarely pass far enough south to cause problems. Mexico was the No. 3 supplier of crude to the United States during the first half of this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Earlier this week, Karl had crossed a rural area in the Yucatan Peninsula as a tropical storm, bringing heavy rains and forcing some evacuations, but spared tourist hot-spot Cancun.
In the Atlantic, Category 3 Hurricane Igor traveled at 125-mph/(201 kmh) as it churned on a course that could take it to Bermuda by Sunday.
Hurricane Julia was located far east of Igor and posed no immediate threat to land.
(Reporting by Robert Campbell, Patrick Rucker and Jason Lange; Editing by Bill Trott and Louise Ireland)
