Hurricane Emily on Tuesday was expected to strengthen as it headed towards Texas or Mexico over the warm Gulf of Mexico, after lashing Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the Caribbean, killing 10 people so far.
Tens of thousands of tourists were evacuated or took refuge in shelters at beach resorts in Yucatan as 215kph winds tore down trees and power lines on Monday.
Coastal resorts around Cancun, renowned for its palm trees and beaches, escaped relatively lightly, as Emily slid back over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
A category-one hurricane with sustained winds near 150kph, down from category four when it struck Yucatan, Emily is expected to make landfall again near Mexico’s border with the American state of Texas.
The hurricane killed five people in Jamaica at the weekend. A 23-year-old woman and her two children were swept away by flood waters, along with two men who tried to rescue them, police said.
The woman’s car was stranded at St Elizabeth on the southern coast of the Caribbean island. The men were trying to help her when all were swept over a 20m-high cliff.
High winds caused the crash of a helicopter used to evacuate workers on Gulf of Mexico oil platforms in Emily’s path, killing the pilot and co-pilot, Mexico’s state oil firm Petroleos Mexicanos said.
The company said it had evacuated 15 530 workers from oil platforms in the Gulf. It also announced the temporary suspension of three-quarters of its daily oil production, or 2,9-million barrels per day, which is expected to resume completely by Friday.
The storm killed one man in a mudslide in Grenada last week. A German man, Ralph Hennebohle, was electrocuted to death on Sunday in the Mexican resort of Playa del Carmen as he prepared his house for the looming hurricane, police said.
In the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, an 18-year-old man drowned on Sunday night after being swept into a river swollen by the storm.
Playa del Carmen, the island of Cozumel and the resort of Tulum were among resorts in the zone south of Cancun that suffered most from Emily as it crossed the Yucatan peninsula in southeastern Mexico, said Jose Reivosa, an official with the Cancun tourist office.
But Felix Gonzalez, governor of Quintana Roo province, which includes Cancun, told Mexican media later that ”the worst had passed” without any reports of serious damage and no immediate loss of life in the storm.
”The important thing is that there are no casualties among the 50 000 tourists,” he said.
Authorities said the main damage was fallen trees and power lines.
Thousands of tourists and residents sheltered in barricaded homes and hotels along the so-called Mayan Riviera. Tens of thousands were moved to emergency shelters or out of the area ahead of the storm, officials said.
Cancun’s international airport was closed on Sunday after more than 8 000 tourists flew home, while thousands of other visitors were taken to shelters.
About 30 000 of the 80 000 tourists in the area cut short their vacations, officials said.
In a public advisory at 9am GMT on Tuesday, the United States National Hurricane Centre said Emily, with diminished winds of about 120kph, was 440km east of La Pesca, Mexico, and about 485km south-east of Brownsville, Texas.
The centre warned that Emily is expected to regain strength before making landfall and that preparations to protect lives and property should be ”rushed to completion”.
Emily is expected to near the coast of north-east Mexico late on Tuesday as southern Texas and Mexico braced for the hurricane to hit the border region.
Emily is the second major storm to hit the region in two weeks following Hurricane Dennis, which left at least 62 dead, mostly in Haiti.
Typhoon hits mainland China
Meanwhile, more than a million people fled their homes along China’s south-eastern coast as Typhoon Haitang slammed into the mainland on Tuesday after hammering Taiwan with heavy winds and rains and killing four people.
Falling rocks killed one man in south-eastern Taiwan, two women drowned in the north of the island and a fourth victim was swept away by water while fishing in central Taiwan, the Centre for Disaster Response said. A fisherman was also reported missing.
Dozens were injured, mostly by falling trees and signboards, as swollen rivers pounded bridges and knocked away roads.
At 5.10pm local time, the typhoon hit the coastal Chinese town of Huangqi in Fujian province, said an official with the provincial weather bureau who identified herself only as Miss Li.
Heavy rain was falling over much of the south-eastern province.
State television showed villages awash with floodwaters that turned streets into rivers as well as soldiers delivering boxes of food to people living in temporary shelters.
More than a million people were evacuated from their homes in Fujian and Zhejiang province directly to the north, China Central Television reported.
One correspondent said the harsh winds felt like sand pelting his face.
But the winds weakened as the typhoon moved inland toward the north-west, and government forecasters predicted it will be downgraded to a tropical storm late on Tuesday, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The airport at Fujian’s provincial capital, Fuzhou, was closed and flights diverted north to Shanghai or south to Xiamen, the agency said.
Fuzhou is about 800km south-west of Shanghai, China’s main commercial city.
Storm winds were blamed for eight traffic accidents on Monday on Fujian’s main highway, where billboards also were blown away, Xinhua said. The report gave no figures on casualties.
China had been bracing for the storm for days, with soldiers stacking sandbags along embankments.
Even before the storm hit, the Sai river near the city of Fu’an in Fujian had surged to 1,85m above the official flood level, according to the website of the Fujian Water Management Bureau.
Haitang, named after a Chinese flower, hammered northern Taiwan on Monday.
Schools, government offices and financial markets were closed on Taiwan as torrential rains whipped through the capital, Taipei, uprooting trees and dislodging billboards in the island’s north.
Taiwan’s farms suffered damage estimated at $14,2-million, the official Council of Agriculture said. No damage figures were immediately available for other industries. — Sapa-AP, AFP