AMERICAS

Hurricane Patricia Strikes Mexico

By ELISABETH MALKIN,  and 
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Hurricane Patricia Makes Landfall

The Category 5 storm arrived in Mexico with high winds and crashing waves.
 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on  October 23, 2015. Photo by Jonathan Levinson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Watch in Times Video »
MEXICO CITY — The strongest hurricane ever known to assault the Western Hemisphere slammed into Mexico’s southwest Pacific Coast on Friday, 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 miles per hour as it struck land, having slowed considerably from earlier speeds of about 200 miles per hour 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 in the 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.

INTERACTIVE MAP 

Visualizing the Size and Strength of Hurricane Patricia 

Maps showing the extent and wind speeds of the strongest hurricane ever known to assault the Western Hemisphere. 
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Less than an hour after Patricia made landfall as a Category 5 storm — the fiercest — the National Hurricane Center said it was barreling inland over southwestern Mexico with maximum sustained wind speeds of 160 m.p.h. But it quickly lost force, slowing to about 130 m.p.h. before 10 p.m.
By 5 a.m. Saturday it had been downgraded to Category 1, with winds of about 75 m.p.h., and the center predicted that the hurricane would weaken to a tropical storm later Saturday morning and dissipate by Saturday evening.
President Enrique Peña Nieto met with his cabinet Friday evening to assess the damage. There were no initial reports of deaths. 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.
But he warned that the “phenomenon is continuing in its course” and asked people to remain in shelters. “We cannot let our guard down,” he said.
The governor of the state of Jalisco, Aristóteles Sandoval, said a little after 9 p.m. on Friday that in his state, at least, there had been no “irreparable damages” recorded so far, only “severe infrastructure damages” like blocked roads, flooding, damaged buildings, hotels and homes — all things that “can be repaired," he said.
An employee boarded up a store in the Pacific coastal resort of Puerto Vallarta on Friday. The rapid strengthening of the storm caught many people off guard. Henry Romero/Reuters 
“This gives 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 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,” said Mr. Peña Nieto 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.

Hurricane Patricia Live Coverage 

The storm hit along the coast near the city of Cuixmala, 55 miles northwest of Manzanillo, according to the National Hurricane Center. 
“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.”
By afternoon, she said, the authorities had cleared the streets and demanded that everyone either go home or to a shelter. The storm was expected to dump from six to 20 inches of rain in the affected states, and could result in flash floods and mudslides in mountainous areas, officials warned.
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.

Hurricane Patricia: What You Need to Know 

Answers to common questions about the storm, the scale of which has astonished meteorologists. 
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.”
At 1 p.m., guests began reporting to a windowless service area that had been set up as a shelter to ride out the storm. Staff brought in deck chairs and recliners from the pool.
“I don’t think they had time to prepare for everything,” said Clarence Craig, 69, a retired postmaster from Sacramento who was vacationing with his girlfriend Jan Robinson, 62, a retired California state employee.
Matias Biluron, 33, a singer, was finishing up a two-week contract to perform at the hotel with his group, Marconi. “If you panic, it’s worse,” he said. “People aren’t that panicked.”
But Mr. Biluron was keenly aware of how much harder the storm would hit those living in precarious dwellings in the poorer parts of Puerto Vallarta.

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“Imagine the people who have to leave their homes,” he said. “Poor people.”
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.
Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in the United States said Friday morning that the hurricane could inflict catastrophic damage and leave areas uninhabitable for weeks or months.
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.
Gripped with anxiety as Hurricane Patricia approached, Ms. Ney, the teacher in Puerto Vallarta, recalled unpleasant memories of Hurricane Paulina in 1997, a Category 3 storm that she said was followed by water shortages and respiratory illnesses.
“And that was a 3!” she said. “That’s my only basis for comparison, so all I keep thinking is if that Category 3 was that bad, I don’t even want to think of a 5. We are all very alarmed.”
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.
By 4 p.m., Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission cut off power in parts of the region. Enrique Ochoa, the utility’s director, said that the commission had 219 emergency power generators available in the area to provide electricity to clinics, hospitals and water purification plants.
Mexico’s food distribution agency reported that it had 390 tons of food available to distribute in the area, enough to supply 150,000 rations a day from its 300 storage facilities in the area.
“All the precautions to protect life and property should be completed,” Mr. Feltgen said. “People need to be in a safe place and stay hunkered down until this storm is over.”
Elisabeth Malkin reported from Mexico City, and Azam Ahmed and Frances Robles from Miami. Paulina Villegas contributed reporting from Guadalajara, Mexico, and Liam Stack, Paula Duran and Katie Rogers from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on October 24, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hurricane Slams Coast of Mexico With High Force. Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe