At least 27 dead after Hurricane Otis batters Acapulco

MONTERREY, Mexico – At least 27 people were killed as Hurricane Otis crashed near Acapulco, officials said Thursday as they began to assess the toll after the storm rapidly intensified into the most powerful cyclone on record to have hit Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

Mexican Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez said at least four people were also still missing in Acapulco after the unexpectedly intense storm slammed ashore. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose vehicle got stuck in the mud on his way to assess storm damage, said officials would be going door to door to homes and businesses on Thursday to assess damage.

“We were prepared. However, it was something exceptional and unexpected,” López Obrador said Thursday about the hurricane’s strength and landfall. “We thought it was going to enter through Acapulco or in Tepa, in that coastal fringe, but it hit more in Acapulco.”

López Obrador said around 10,000 elements of the armed forces, national guard and navy were deployed to the affected area.

The Category 5 hurricane’s peak winds toppled practically every electrical pole in the resort city. López Obrador said about 2,000 Federal Electricity Commission workers are on the ground working to restore power. More than 504,000 people in the city had lost power after the storm came through, Rodríguez said.

“In all of Acapulco, not a single pole from the CFE service remained standing,” López Obrador told reporters on Thursday, referring to the state-run electricity service. But progress was slow. Getting the electrical grid back up was crucial to restoring water service to the port city, he noted.

Hospitals became wind tunnels for the storms harrowing front, and hotel beds scattered in flooded lobbies. Rodriguez said the Acapulco airport remains closed. Debris from destroyed homes and the aftermath of mud lines litter the streets. One major highway that connects Acapulco to Mexico City had reopened.

“What Acapulco experienced was very disastrous. People sheltered in place, and that’s why fortunately there wasn’t more loss of human lives,” López Obrador said. “What is being said here (in the news conference) doesn’t have a precedent in the country in the last years, not only for how it picked up force in so little time, but in the magnitude of the hurricane and how it hit with such force.”

He said the government will create a reconstruction program to help people whose homes and businesses were affected by the hurricane. He noted farmworkers lost corn fields due to the strong winds and the rain.

The hurricane was an enormous blow to the poor state of Guerrero, which relies heavily on tourism income, especially from Acapulco. About 80% of Acapulco’s hotels suffered damage from the massive storm, according to the governor of Guerrero state, Evelyn Salgado.

Entrepreneurs said it was likely that the city would lose the crucial revenue from the Christmas holiday season.

“Due to the devastation in the Acapulco area, returning to normality is going to take a long time,” the National Council of Tourism Entrepreneurs said.

The city’s hotels were at 50% occupancy when the storm hit, with a major mining convention underway. Salgado said the state government on Thursday would start sending buses to hotels to evacuate tourists.

Otis stunned forecasters Tuesday as it intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in just 12 hours, a record rate of strengthening in the eastern Pacific. Earlier forecasts had anticipated the storm would strike the coast as a strong tropical storm or minor hurricane, as computer models did not simulate the storm’s sudden leap in strength.

As Otis’s top winds catapulted to 165 mph Tuesday night just ahead of landfall, the National Hurricane Center called it a “nightmare scenario” because coastal residents were anticipating a much weaker storm. Climate scientists say abnormally warm Pacific waters offshore the coast of Mexico – fueled by human-caused climate change – may have given the storm an extra boost.

Otis became the fourth named storm to strike Mexico’s west coast this month, following Max, Lidia and Norma.