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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2005 
Hurricane Emily Gathers Strength in Gulf
 Mark Stevenson - The Associated Press
| | Mexico's President Vicente Fox speaks with a woman during a shelter visit in Cozumel, Mexico Monday, after Hurricane Emily ripped roofs off luxury hotels along Mexico's Mayan Riviera. (Photo: Presidencia HO) |
Hurricane Emily gathered strength in the Gulf of Mexico for a second strike against Mexico and south Texas late Tuesday, after ripping roofs off resort hotels and stranding thousands of tourists in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Emily hit the Mayan Riviera on Monday as a fierce Category 4 storm with 135 mph winds, causing millions of dollars in damage. Hundreds of local residents were left homeless, but no deaths or major injuries were reported.
The storm weakened during the rampage but once back out to sea it began to strengthen again, developing sustained winds of nearly 90 mph. Forecasters expected Emily, a Category 1 hurricane Tuesday morning, to hit northeastern Mexico, possibly as a major hurricane, as early as Tuesday night.
Southern Texas was also threatened, and the National Hurricane Center in Miami posted hurricane warnings along both sides of the Mexico-Texas border.
From the Mexican port of Tampico 250 miles north to the southern Texas coastline, residents boarded up windows and evacuated low-lying areas. Mexico's state-run oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, evacuated 15,000 oil workers from rigs in the storm's path.
In Texas, many tourists on South Padre Island started packing up Monday, although about 10,000 remained, officials said. A steady stream of RVs headed north from the island resort after a local judge ordered vehicles in danger of being blown over by high winds to leave county parks on the island.
Meanwhile, Yucatan Peninsula residents waded through knee-deep flood waters to assess damage from Monday's hit. Many are poor and came to the Yucatan Peninsula for jobs. They live in flimsy thatched huts just out of sight of the resorts.
Officials for the state of Quintana Roo estimated about 3,000 such huts were damaged or destroyed.
Tourists who spent the night in makeshift shelters emerged to try to find ways home. Many went to the Cancun airport, which reopened Monday after closing Sunday afternoon as the storm approached.
About 60,000 tourists were evacuated from the resort towns of Cancun, Tulum, Playa de Carmen and Cozumel, an island just south of Cancun known for its diving.
"All night long, cold water was pouring in through the holes in the wall," said tourist Graham Brighton, of Leicester, England, one of about 1,000 people who spent the night on thin foam pads lined up on a gymnasium floor in Cancun. "There were just far too many people crammed into one space."
Sitting in the roofless, rain-soaked lobby of the Copacabana Hotel near Puerto Aventuras, Samuel Norrod, of Livingston, Tenn., waited to hear if his travel agent could get flights home for him, his wife and his 13-year-old granddaughter.
They rode out the storm in the hotel's ballroom.
"We could hear the windows smashing out. The wind would get loud, and then it would get soft again. And then, for about 25 minutes, it got real still," Norrod said, describing the calm eye of the hurricane.
The worst damage was in Puerto Aventuras, where the storm's eye came ashore some 60 miles south of Cancun and in Tulum, a collection of thatched hut hotels along a secluded strip of beach that is popular with backpackers.
Quintana Roo state officials reported little damage to the ancient pyramids in Tulum or elsewhere, but a team of archaeologists was to inspect sites throughout the state. Tulum's streets were deserted Monday and the village was without electricity, according to officials reached by telephone.
But damage from the hurricane was evident everywhere on the eastern Yucatan coast, famous for its white-sand beaches and turquoise waters.
Power was knocked out all along the coast. The wind snapped concrete utility poles in two along a half-mile stretch of highway between Playa del Carmen and Cancun to the north. Plate glass windows were shattered on the ground floors of numerous businesses in Playa del Carmen, while residents waded through knee-deep water flooding some streets.
Emily hit Mexico after sweeping across the Caribbean, causing flooding that killed a family of four in Jamaica but sparing the Cayman Islands major damage.
Emily was the strongest storm this early in the Atlantic season since record-keeping began in 1860. That had many in the Yucatan worried they were in for a rough hurricane season, which runs through October.
"We have a well-founded fear that three or four such storms could hit," said Francisco Alor, Cancun's mayor.
On the Net: National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov |
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