Tropical Storm Paul formed off Mexico’s Pacific Coast on Saturday and looked set to turn into a hurricane as it headed toward luxury resorts on the Baja California Peninsula, the United States National Hurricane Centre said.
Charts showed Paul passing near the tip of the desert peninsula popular with US tourists next week, before heading for the Mexican mainland across the narrow Sea of Cortez.
Hurricanes that enter the Sea of Cortez, surrounded on three sides by land, tend to fizzle out after running aground, posing no risk to the US.
Paul was moving west with maximum winds near 85kph and was expected to veer toward the peninsula and strengthen in coming days due to climatic factors including warm ocean currents, the hurricane centre said.
”Paul is currently on a strengthening trend,” it said.
The luxury resorts and golf courses of Los Cabos, on the tip of Baja California, which extends down from the US mainland, had two narrow hurricane escapes last month.
Hurricane Lane missed the resorts in mid-September before crashing into the mainland and leaving a path of destruction on the Pacific Coast, killing three close to areas Paul could hit later next week according to projections.
Two weeks earlier, Hurricane John forced tourists to flee the resorts of Los Cabos but left the posh holiday spots unharmed. Three people, including a Briton, died when it slammed ashore farther north on the peninsula.
Crossing their fingers that they would have a lucky escape for the third time in two months, civil protection officials in the resort of San Jose del Cabo said it was too early to begin evacuations but that they were tracking Paul carefully.
”You just don’t know with these things,” said local civil protection spokesperson Salvador Banaga. ”In my opinion we’ve been a bit too lucky.” — Reuters