MEXICO CITY — The strongest hurricane ever known to assault the Western Hemisphere slammed into Mexico’s southwest Pacific Coast on Friday evening, transforming hotels into makeshift shelters, shuttering schools, closing airports and sending inhabitants racing to bus stations to flee inland.
MEXICO CITY — The strongest hurricane ever known to assault the Western Hemisphere slammed into Mexico’s southwest Pacific Coast on Friday evening, transforming hotels into makeshift shelters, shuttering schools, closing airports and sending inhabitants racing to bus stations to flee inland.
The storm, named Hurricane Patricia, packed winds of about 165 mph as it struck land, having slowed considerably from earlier speeds of about 200 mph as it spun toward a coastline dotted with tiny fishing villages and five-star resorts in cities like Puerto Vallarta.
As the outer wall of the hurricane swept over the coast at 6:15 p.m., 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, who was huddled in his home with five children and four other adults. When the wind started blowing, it wasn’t long before a neighbor’s roof was in his backyard. “I saw it fly, and I saw it land in my patio,” he said.
Less than an hour after landfall, the National Hurricane Center said the hurricane was barreling inland over southwestern Mexico with maximum sustained wind speeds of 160 mph. But it quickly lost force, slowing to about 130 mph before 10 p.m. local time. It was downgraded to a Category 4, and the center predicted that the hurricane would rapidly weaken to a tropical storm by Saturday morning and a tropical depression by Saturday afternoon.
The governor of Jalisco state, Aristóteles Sandoval, said a little after 9 p.m. Friday that in his state, at least, there had been no “irreparable damages” recorded, no loss of human lives reported so far, but “severe infrastructure damages,” like blocked roads, flooding, damaged buildings, hotels and homes — all things that “can be repaired,” he said.
“This give us hope that we can move forward,” he said, “but we still need to be alert.”
The government of Mexico had declared a state of emergency in dozens of municipalities in Colima, Nayarit and Jalisco states. 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.