Hurricane Odile, the most powerful ever to strike the Baja California peninsula of Mexico, rammed into the luxury resorts of Cabo San Lucas on Monday - smashing windows, flooding roads and causing parts of hotels to collapse.
Tourists and locals emerged from both shelters and once-gleaming buildings to assess the damage after the storm roared through, a Category 3 packing 125 mph wind.
'We stepped into a completely demolished paradise,' Alycia Houser, a student at Oregon State University, told NBC News by email from Cabo San Lucas, where she and six relatives had their vacation upended.
They were staying in a presidential suite at the Grand Solmar resort and had to move to a resort nearby as the storm approached. During the worst of it, as the family rushed to take cover in the bathroom, a sliding glass door shattered just after her father crossed in front of it.
'We could hear things crashing into the walls, and the pressure in the room was horrible,' she said. 'Our ears were hurting and we were exhausted.'
They left the bathroom after two and a half hours, and spent Monday morning walking around 'in awe of everything that was destroyed,' Houser said. The seven of them were sore and exhausted but unhurt, she said.
Just after sunrise, it was still too early to get a full sense of the destruction, but a local newspaper reported that people were hurt by flying glass and that a fire had broken out at the Cascadas resort. A phone call there from NBC News went unanswered.
'There are parts of hotels that are completely collapsed,' Deneb Poli, a medical worker at the Hotel Melia Cabo Real, told bberitaa.blogspot.com. 'The damage is pretty extensive.'
Room windows at the Westin blew out, mud and rocks blocked the entrance to the Club Regina, and workers said the Hilton was seriously damaged, the AP reported.
Odile dumped six months' worth of rain in an hour. Mexican authorities evacuated coastal areas and readied shelters for up to 30,000 people.
At one shelter in Los Cabos, tourists crowded on the concrete stairs of a service area after the designated shelter area was destroyed.
Josh Morgerman, a California storm chaser, said his Cabo hotel lobby exploded in a 'heap of rubble.' Writing on Twitter, he said he 'escaped by crawling, scampering, running.'
Chelsea Ballenberger, a nurse from Alabama vacationing in the nearby city of La Paz, said she was forced to take refuge in the shower when her room flooded.
'As soon as we moved to the shower the windows shattered,' she wrote on Facebook. 'We can hear the wind howling everywhere. ... Definitely the scariest thing I have ever been through.' Jason T. Vogt, a Canadian expatriate, simply described the scene as 'total devastation' in a Facebook post.
Nick Wiltgen, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel, said he was monitoring 'mind-boggling' reports of 11 inches of rain in just one hour - almost as much as the region's yearly average of 13 inches. While this measurement could be due to storm-damaged equipment, he said reports of 7 inches were believable.
The storm was bearing down on La Paz, a city of 200,000 people, but was expected to weaken as it headed up the peninsula through Tuesday. The U.S. Southwest could see heavy rain and flash flooding on Tuesday.
First published September 15 2014, 2:52 AM
Posted by Unknown on Monday, September 15, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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