Hurricane Patricia battered the west coast of Mexico on Friday night with torrential rains and winds of 165mph, but without causing any major damage or loss of life.
Hurricane Patricia: fears of landslides in Mexico as storm brings downpours
Read more
Around 50,000 people were evacuated and electricity supplies were suspended in preparation for the Category 5 hurricane, amid fears of catastrophic destruction in towns along the country’s Pacific coast.
But Patricia rapidly weakened over land as it collided with the Sierra Madre mountain range. On Saturday morning it was downgraded to a tropical storm as winds dropped to 50mph.
As people prepared for the worst, homes and shop fronts were barricaded, airports closed and thousands evacuated from the popular beach resort of Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco. The town escaped any major damage.
“We had pretty steady, fairly heavy rain most of the night, but not a tremendous amount of wind, and there’s really been no damage,” Paul Crist, owner of the Mercurio Hotel one block off the beach in Vallarta, told the Guardian. “We were very, very lucky.
“Everyone at my hotel stayed. We made a bit of a hurricane party out of it, actually, which made for a very long day for me serving tequila shots and beer and cooking on a little electric stove to make sure everyone was fed.”
The agricultural town of Cihuatlán – 45 miles south of where Patricia made landfall – was not as lucky. Strong winds flattened banana crops and houses flooded as the river burst its banks.
Cobian Esparza, who works at a local golf club, said his was among around 150 homes in the town to be flooded as water surged around 2am and rose to higher than a metre indoors.
“We were really scared,” he said. “The floodwater covered everything in just 20 minutes. But it was only material damage; no one was hurt here.”