Hurricane heads towards oil plants
Hurricane Dean swept across the Yucatan peninsula, toppling trees, power lines and houses as it bore down on the heart of Mexico’s oil industry.
Glitzy resorts on the Mayan Riviera were spared, but vulnerable Mayan villages were exposed to the full fury of one of history’s most intense storms.
President Felipe Calderon said no deaths were immediately reported in Mexico, after Dean killed 13 people in the Caribbean.
But driving rain, poor communications and impassable roads made it difficult to determine how isolated Mayan communities fared in the sparsely populated jungle where Dean made landfall as a ferocious Category 5 hurricane.
“It wasn’t minutes of terror. It was hours,” said Catharine Morales, 30, a native of Montreal, Canada, who has lived in Majahual for a year. “The walls felt like they were going to explode.”
One of a handful people to ignore military orders to evacuate, she weathered the storm in her new brick-walled house with her husband and seven-month-old baby as 165mph winds – with gusts of 200mph, faster than the take-off speed of many passenger jets – blew out windows and pulled pieces from their roof.
Hundreds of homes were collapsed in Majahual when Dean’s eye passed almost directly overhead, crumpling steel girders, splintering wooden structures and washing away about half of the immense concrete dock that transformed the sleepy fishing village into one of Mexico’s busiest cruise ship destinations.
The storm surge covered almost the entire town in waist-deep sea water.
Dean weakened over land but was expected to strengthen today as its eye moved over the Bay of Campeche, home to more than 100 oil platforms and three major oil exporting ports.
The sprawling, westward storm was projected to slam into the mainland tonight with renewed force near Laguna Verde, Mexico’s only nuclear power plant.
Plant manager Rafael Fernandez said 2,000 workers would be sent home and operations would suspended today.
He said the hurricane did not pose a threat to the two nuclear reactors, but that the plant would temporarily stop energy production.
“We can’t produce energy if we don’t have the lines to distribute the energy and that’s why we decided to stop production,” Fernandez said.
At 4am British time today, Dean was a Category 1 storm with winds of 80mph and was centred about 215 miles east-north-east of Veracruz.
It was moving west-north-west at 18mph, the US National Hurricane Centre said.
“We often see that when a storm weakens, people let down their guard completely. You shouldn’t do that,” said Jamie Rhome at the hurricane centre.
“This storm probably won’t become a Category 5 again, but it will still be powerful.”
While 50,000 tourists were safely evacuated from resorts on the Yucatan peninsula, many poor Indians closer to the storm’s direct path refused military orders to leave their homes, according to General Alfonso Garcia, who was running shelters in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 60 miles north west of Majahual.
Troops evacuated more than 250 small communities and 8,000 people took refuge in 500 shelters, said Jorge Acevedo, a spokesman for Quintana Roo state.
Little was known about thousands of others who rode out the storm in low-lying communities of stick huts. Mexican officials said they were making slow progress to reach them on nearly impassable unpaved roads.
Dean was the third-most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall since record keeping began in the 1850s.
It had a minimum central pressure of 906 millibars, the third-lowest at landfall after the 1935 Labour Day hurricane in the Florida Keys and Hurricane Gilbert, which hit Cancun in 1988.
The deadliest storm to hit Latin America in modern times was 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, which killed nearly 11,000 people and left more than 8,000 missing, most in Honduras and Nicaragua.
