The facts about this storm are that it was the strongest ever with the center pressure down to 879 MB, reached max winds of 201 mph and was a few hours from heavily populated cities in Mexico.
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RECORD-breaking Hurricane Patricia pushed rapidly inland over western Mexico early yesterday, weakening to tropical storm force while dumping torrential rains that authorities warned could cause deadly floods and mudslides.
The modest homes of 40 families in the fishing village of Chamela were blown away by Patricia’s powerful winds after it made landfall as a Category Five monster in Jalisco state late Friday. “Things are in a bad state where we work”, a hotel worker in the resort of Barra de Navidad near to the major port of Manzanillo tells Reuters.
Patricia is now expected to dissipate over Mexico’s high mountain terrain on Saturday and bring more moisture to Texas.
This year’s El Niño, an unusually warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation that creates a band of warm water near the equator, was ranked as one of the strongest on record and is largely to blame for the enormity of the storm.
Tourists who have been stranded when the hurricane arrived had no choice but to hunker down and stay indoors until Patricia leaves. The National Hurricane center initially sent exploration aircrafts inside Hurricane Patricia earlier and they managed to measure pressure as low as 880-millibars, the lowest hurricane ever recorded in the region.
He added, however, that “we can not yet let our guard down”. So far there have been no reports of deaths or major damage from the storm, suggesting that the wide-scale evacuations and other preparations conducted by Mexican officials were successful.
By midmorning Saturday, the storm had sustained winds of 35mph (55kph) and it was located about 95 miles (155 kilometres) northeast of Zacatecas.
He couldn’t get a flight out before the storm hit and chose to hunker down in the hotel. It moved quickly but lost power in the mountains that rise up along the Pacific coast and was downgraded to a tropical depression on Saturday as it headed through central Mexico. Power was out in the coastal resort of Puerto Vallarta, where the government bused out more than 10,000 tourists, but telephone service was reportedly uninterrupted.
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Several hotels in Manzanillo were damaged as the hurricane made landfall.
