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The Strongest Hurricane on Record in the Western Hemisphere Hits Mexico

Hurricane Patricia hits land along the Mexican Pacific coast and weakens rapidly. Initial reports suggest damage not as bad as feared, though risk of floods and landslides remains.
Imagen vía NOAA

Hurricane Patricia, the strongest storm ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, barreled into Mexico's Pacific coast on Friday evening with initial reports suggesting damage was less severe than had been feared.

The US National Hurricane Center said the category 5 storm had sustained winds of about 200 miles per hour on Friday morning, while the World Meteorological Organization compared the storm to Typhoon Haiyan, which killed thousands in the Philippines in 2013.

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By the early hours of Saturday the Hurricane Center reported that the storm had weakened to a category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of about 100 miles per hour.

"Rapid weakening is expected to continue," the Center's 1am report said. "Patricia is forecast to become a tropical storm later this morning, and a tropical depression this afternoon."

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto released a videoed address to the nation late on Friday confirming that the first reports suggested "the damage has been less than would be normal for a hurricane of this magnitude." With the hurricane still dumping large quantities of rain that could cause flooding or landslides the president added, "we cannot drop our guard."

Related: For the First Time on Record, Three Category-4 Hurricanes Occurred Simultaneously in the Pacific Ocean

Before the storm made land the authorities had closed airports and suspended classes at schools in the coastal states of Jalisco, Colima, and Nayarit. The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) cut electricity in all three states, and state-owned oil company Pemex stopped selling gasoline in the area.

The storm's center hit land shortly after 6pm on a sparsely populated part of the coast between the resort city of Puerto Vallarta and the port of Manzanillo, located 177 miles to the south.

"Whichever way you turn, there's debris," said Juan Michel, 36, a hotel manager in the resort of Barra de Navidad to the northwest of Manzanillo, who was taking cover from Patricia with 13 others. "We've never seen anything like this."

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The government had warned that ash from the volcano of Colima, about 130 miles from Puerto Vallarta, could combine with massive rainfall to trigger "liquid cement"-style mudflows and announced it had evacuated villages that could be in its path.

The US government issued an advisory urging its nationals to steer clear of beaches and rough seas and to take shelter as instructed by Mexican officials.

The Mexican authorities said they had set up nearly 1,800 shelters in the hurricane's path and were evacuating people from vulnerable buildings and communities along the coast.

Aristoteles Sandoval, the governor of Jalisco, told reporters that he expected about 15,000 people would be spending the night in shelters in Puerto Vallarta alone. Before the storm struck, long lines of traffic stretched out from the resort en route to the major city of Guadalajara, around a 5-hour drive inland.

Related: How the Jalisco New Generation Cartel Is Terrorizing the People of Western Mexico

Loudspeakers along the shore of the resort, that is popular with US and Canadian tourists, blared orders to evacuate hotels, and the streets emptied as police sirens wailed.

Hurricane Patricia grew at "incredible rate," the World Meteorological Organization said earlier. "The winds are enough to get a plane in the air and keep it flying," WMO spokeswoman Clare Nullis told a U.N. briefing in Geneva.

Nullis likened the storm's destructive capacity to Typhoon Haiyan that killed more than 6,300 people when it swept ashore in November 2013, destroying around 90 percent of the city of Tacloban. The strongest storm ever recorded was Cyclone Tip that hit Japan in 1979.

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