(USATODAY)MEXICO CITY — A hurricane that swept into Mexico as the most powerful storm ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere rapidly lost e...
As nervous residents and frazzled tourists awoke to flooded roads and widespread power failures, rescue workers were sent up and down the western coast to assess the damage.
President Enrique Peña Nieto said there were no initial reports of deaths but warned that the storm continued to pose a threat. “We still can’t lower our guard,” he told the nation late Friday night.
As the hurricane continued to move inland it was downgraded to a tropical storm. But the authorities warned that heavy rains could still cause flash flooding and landslides.
“Many hillsides can weaken and collapse with Hurricane Patricia’s rain. Watch out!” warned Mexico’s civil protection agency.
The eye of the storm, Hurricane Patricia, made landfall Friday at around 6:15 p.m. local time near Cuixmala in Jalisco State, in southwest Mexico. While powerful, the storm was compact, with the highest winds felt only about 35 miles from its center.
A family at a bus station in Guadalajara, where they arrived from Puerto Vallarta after fleeing Hurricane Patricia. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times As it slammed into the coast, the storm was still firmly within the Category 5 range, with winds topping 165 m.p.h., strong enough to lift cars from the street, tear the roofs off house and pull trees up from their roots. But it quickly lost force, slowing to about 130 m.p.h. before 10 p.m.
By 1 a.m. Saturday it had been downgraded to a Category 2 storm, with winds of about 100 m.p.h., and by early Saturday morning it was downgraded further, to a tropical storm, with winds below 50 m.p.h.
One local resident, Jesús Alejandro del Angel Ruiz, 22, took advantage of a lull in the wind and rain Friday night to step out of his home in the Tapeixtles section of Manzanillo and survey the damage. He found fallen trees, branches, light poles – and two of his neighbors’ roofs.
“This area we live in gets flooded and that’s what this hurricane left: floods,” Mr. del Angel said. “A few zinc roofs went flying. The storm lifted them off, even though they had been secured. The storm had the strength to just lift them. “
He said a Category 1 storm that hit the area in 2011 left much heavier damage. It appears that improvements to drainage canals after that storm and the government’s efforts to evacuate vulnerable areas this time paid off, he said.
Although Mr. del Angel’s neighborhood was flooded, several other areas that are usually swamped during storms were dry on Friday night.
“There were moments last night that the winds were a bit strong and the sound it made was really ugly,” Mr. del Angel, a communications student, said Saturday. “It was surprising that nothing more happened.”
The governor of Jalisco, Aristóteles Sandoval, speaking at a news conference from Puerto Vallarta, said that there was no “irreparable” damage but that there had been “severe infrastructure damages.”
The roads were blocked in many areas by downed trees and other debris, making it hard to assess the damage.
“We still need to be alert,” he told reporters.
Hurricanes often begin losing strength once they hit land, since they lose contact with the warm ocean waters that give them energy, and Hurricane Patricia was no exception.
The National Hurricane Center warned, however, that “strong and damaging winds at higher elevations could persist through this morning,” and that heavy rain “is likely to cause life-threatening flash floods and mudslides in the Mexican states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima, Michoacan and Guerrero through today.”
The National Weather Service office in Brownsville, Tex., issued flood warnings for South Texas communities likely to be hit by heavy rains through Sunday.
In North Texas, near Corsicana, a 64-car Union Pacific freight train derailed overnight after heavy flooding washed away a section of the track. No one was hurt, but two crew members were forced to seek safety when a section of the derailed train became submerged in the rising waters, the local authorities said.
As the outer wall of the hurricane swept over the coast in Friday afternoon, trees were quickly flattened, landslides tumbled along a major road, light poles were toppled and roofs flew off.
“You had to feel how the air trembled,” said Yael Barragan, a trucking service coordinator in the port city of Manzanillo, huddled in his home with five children and four other adults. When the wind started blowing, it was not long before a neighbor’s roof was in his backyard. “I saw it fly, and I saw it land in my patio,” he said.
Margarito Figueroa, a construction worker in Naranjo, just north of Manzanillo, which was hit by the full force of the storm, said as the wind tore through the town Friday night he expected to find more extensive damage on Saturday morning.
“I imagined a catastrophe,” he said. “But I am happy, it was only trees, cables and branches.”
President Peña Nieto met with his cabinet on Friday evening to assess the damage. Afterward, he taped a message to the nation.
“The first reports confirm that the damage has been less than that corresponding to a hurricane of this magnitude,” he said in the message, broadcast before midnight. The vivid swirl of the hurricane’s satellite image glowed on the screens of the National Security Council’s command center, forming the backdrop to his speech.
The government of Mexico had declared a state of emergency in dozens of municipalities in the states of Colima, Nayarit and Jalisco. Residents had stacked sandbags around properties and rushed to grocery stores to stock up on supplies. Thousands of people took refuge in shelters in cities across the region.
At the very center of the storm was Cuixmala, one of Mexico’s most exclusive and secluded resorts. The vast estate, which has played host to American dignitaries like Richard M. Nixon, Henry A. Kissinger and Ronald Reagan, began as a private residence for James Goldsmith, a British billionaire. Today, it is a resort and ecological preserve run by his daughter, crowned by the palatial Casa Cuixmala, a Moorish-style chateau that looms over a white sand beach and a private nature reserve.
Officials spent the day on the airwaves urging residents throughout the region to leave or prepare for the hurricane, which transformed suddenly from a tropical storm on Tuesday into a Category 5 storm on Thursday. The speed of that transformation took meteorologists by surprise.
“We are going to go through difficult moments in the face of a phenomenon that we have never seen before,” Mr. Peña Nieto said in a radio interview.
By noon on Friday, there were no more bus tickets to buy or gas to pump in order to evacuate, some residents said. Lines at neighborhood grocery stores, hours long earlier in the day, suddenly disappeared. Those who made it out were long gone. The rest were stuck to weather out the monster storm.
“The plan is that if the water starts to rise, we’ll go up to the second floor,” said Gabriela Ney, a 32-year-old teacher who lives with her husband and their 1-year-old about a mile from the sea in Puerto Vallarta.
Hurricane Patricia was so enormous that Scott Kelly, the American astronaut aboard the International Space Station, posted a photo on Twitter of the storm with the warning: “It’s massive. Be careful!”
Lorena Elizabeth Trujillo left her apartment building near the Puerto Vallarta port on Friday morning to get supplies and found the streets buzzing with civil protection officials, police officers and other authorities barking orders.
“It seemed like the end of the world,” Ms. Trujillo, 27, said in a telephone interview. “I had never seen anything like that in my city. Everyone was running around with bags of food and water. And the traffic! There was so much traffic, I had never seen anything like it.”
The sudden strengthening of the storm also caught tourists off guard. Many scrambled to catch buses because airports in several towns were closed. Cecilia Rangel, a marketing consultant from Mexico City on vacation with four friends near Puerto Vallarta, had no such luck.
As news of the approaching storm spread, she and her friends looked for a way to escape the city. But with the airport closed and buses filled, they braced to wait out the storm out at the Gran Mayan, a luxury hotel complex at the northern tip of Puerto Vallarta’s majestic bay.
“Everybody knows that there are hurricanes in October, but you never think it’s going to hit you,” she said by phone. “First there is the news, then you look for a way to get out, then there’s fear,” added Ms. Rangel. “At the end, you follow everything the hotel tells you.”
Hurricane Patricia is the third serious storm to hit Mexico’s Pacific Coast in recent years. Although the government is well prepared to handle hurricanes, both Hurricane Ingrid, which cut off Acapulco for a week in 2013, and Hurricane Odile, which wreaked widespread damage on the coastal resort of Los Cabos last year, tested the government’s ability to repair infrastructure and restore basic services.
Zorayda Castro Casillas, 32, a radio host in Manzanillo, Mexico’s largest container port, worried about the economic impact of the storm. Port traffic had been halted since Thursday, ships were being sent elsewhere, and by Friday night the city was without electricity. The force of the wind bent street signs over.
Before the hurricane struck, the World Meteorological Organization warned that its strength was comparable to that of Typhoon Haiyan, which caused devastation in the Philippines in 2013. That storm killed more than 6,000 people when it made land fall at the edge of the city of Tacloban, a low-lying and densely populated area thick with squatter settlements.
In the United States, only three Category 5 storms that made landfall have been recorded, Mr. Feltgen of the National Hurricane Center said: a 1935 hurricane that killed more than 400 people; Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi and killed 244 people in 1969; and Hurricane Andrew, which hit Florida in 1992, killing at least 10 people there and three in the Bahamas.
Elisabeth Malkin reported from Mexico City, Azam Ahmed from Colima, Mexico, Frances Robles from Miami and Marc Santora from New York. Paulina Villegas contributed reporting from Guadalajara, Mexico, and Liam Stack, Paula Duran and Katie Rogers from New York.
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