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Acapulco In Ruins

Published by digby on October 26, 2023

A Category 5 hurricane hit the city and nobody saw it coming

I didn’t see one news report about any of that yesterday on cable. (I sure am glad I got to hear hour after hour of lying Republicans instead.) Anyway, it’s a good thing global warming is a hoax or this sort of thing might be a problem:

Hurricane Otis, a tropical storm that strengthened suddenlyinto the most powerful cyclone known to have hit Mexico’s Pacific Coast,slammed into the tourist resort of Acapulco on Wednesday and battered nearby beach communities.

The hurricane’s 165-mph winds shattered windows, rattled tall buildings and snapped power and telephone lines.

There were no immediate reports of deaths — but there was no communication from the areas that were hit hardest. Telephone and internet service was cut, and major roads were flooded or covered by landslides. “We’ve completely lost contact,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told journalists hours after the storm’s landfall at 12:25 a.m. local time. “We just don’t know.”

The Category 5 hurricane disrupted electrical service, plunging beachside hotel rooms in Acapulco into darkness. Guests threw mattresses over shattered windows and scrambled into bathrooms to protect themselves, videos shared on social media showed.

Streets in the city of 1 million disappeared under heavy rains. Cars and shopping carts bobbed in the floodwater. The wind whipped the face offa shopping mall. People on the upper floors of apartment buildings pleaded for help escaping.

“The devastation that we are seeing this morning … is horrific,” journalist Víctor Olivares wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Michelle Rivera, a radio journalist, posted a video she said was recorded in an Acapulco hospital, of people clutching bedclothes as high winds blew through a corridor. Videos shared on social media later in the day showed palm trees bent or toppled, streets full of debris, buildings that looked as though a giant claw had scraped their exteriors.

As recently as Monday, Otis was expected to be a run-of-the-mill tropical storm. But on Tuesday, it intensified faster than any eastern Pacific storm on record. Its winds increased by 90 mph in just 12 hours. It barreled into Acapulco as what the U.S. National Hurricane Center called a “potentially catastrophic” Category 5 storm.

Rapidly intensifying hurricanes are notoriously difficult to predict, but meteorologists tweeted that the forecast for Otis was “an almost incomprehensible miss” and “a fail of epic proportions. ” Hurricane warnings weren’t issued for southern Mexico’s western coast until 2 a.m. local time Tuesday, about 24 hours before landfall. Even then, the forecast was for only a Category 1.

Rapidly intensifying hurricanes — defined as storms whose winds increase by at least 35 mph in 24 hours — have become more common in recent years. They’ve been made more likely by the effects of human-caused climate change and warming oceans. They’re more difficult to forecast and harder to prepare for, often leading to more damage, injuries and deaths.

As Otis approached on Tuesday, authorities in Guerrero state scrambled to open shelters. The army and navy deployed troops to aid residents in damaged buildings.

More than 504,000 customers lost power. Mexico’s state-run electricity utility put its workers on “warrior status” and restored service to nearly half of them before noon Wednesday.

Of special concern was the 140-mile stretch of coastal villagesthat stretches from Acapulco to the beach resort of Zihuatanejo, López Obrador said. The area was lashed two weeks ago by Tropical Storm Max and was in no position to absorb more rainfall.

The rain triggered landslides that blocked the “Highway of the Sun,” the toll road from Mexico City to Acapulco. Other roads were flooded. Hundreds of cars and trucks backed up, unable to pass for hours, including military relief vehicles.

Around the country, people with family or friends in the affected area tried to reach them, without success. Manuel Añorve, a senator representing Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located, said Wednesday afternoon that he was stuck with the scant information appearing on social media.

“I haven’t been able to reach my spouse, my children, my mother, my siblings, my friends,” he told the newspaper 24 Horas. “The information is trickling out in drops. I’m very worried.”

[…]

On Wednesday, though, Acapulco was a city in shock. Dozens of restaurants, hotels and homes suffered serious damage, Mexican media reported.

Among them was the Princess Mundo Imperial, an iconic Acapulco hotel shaped like an Aztec pyramid. The 50-year-old property, with five pools, waterfalls and a golf course, was the final residence of Howard Hughes.

On Wednesday, its roof was shattered and rain poured into the interior, dousing broken furniture, chunks of concrete, splintered wood and mattresses, images shared on social media showed. A car had been swept into the lobby.

A guest at the hotel, Luisa Peña, said she was startled when the lights in her room blinked off on Tuesday night. “I hid in the closet and started to pray, to meditate, to calm myself down,” she said in a video posted to X by the Mexican journalist César Jiménez. “I was overwhelmed by panic.”

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