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Work crews pump out muddy water from the streets of Cihuatlan along the Rio Marabasco on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2015. Hurricane Patricia slammed into Mexico's southwest Pacific Coast causing flooding and mudslides, but the area was spared the extensive damage that was predicted.(Photo: Robert Hanashiro, USAT)
LA MANZANILLA, Mexico —<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Mountains, geography and prayer led to surprisingly little damage and few deaths when Hurricane Patricia, the strongest storm on record<span style="color: Red;">*</span>in the Western Hemisphere, slammed ashore with 165-mph winds.
Experts say Mexico's mountains<span style="color: Red;">*</span>and quick mass evacuations saved lives over the weekend. But ask local residents and they say something else had a hand.
“God takes care of us,” said Yolanda Garcia Casillas, 49, who rode out the storm in this seaside community 20 miles south from where the storm made landfall.
Above-average warm waters of the Pacific<span style="color: Red;">*</span>along with very little wind shear combined to<span style="color: Red;">*</span>quickly<span style="color: Red;">*</span>build Patricia into a monster storm with 200-mph winds as it approached Mexico’s coast, Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Sunday.
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But as it approached the coast Friday evening, the storm’s circular winds collided with the Sierra Madre Occidental range, just as<span style="color: Red;">*</span>quickly weakening it, he said.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>The storm<span style="color: Red;">*</span>came ashore near Cuixmala at 6:15 p.m. Friday as a Category 5 hurricane with 165-mph winds —<span style="color: Red;">*</span>the same strength storm as Hurricane Andrew when it struck South Florida in 1992, he said.
Unlike that sprawling storm, Patricia had a compact eye only 5<span style="color: Red;">*</span>nautical miles across, and it’s strongest winds extended just 15 miles from the eye, Feltgen said. As it crashed with the mountains, the hurricane fell apart. By 4 a.m. Saturday, it weakened to a Category 1 storm with 75-mph winds and was depleted to a post-tropical depression that afternoon, he said.
“In less than 24 hours after making landfall as a Category 5 hurricane, it was gone,” Feltgen said.
Patricia also picked the best possible place to arrive: a<span style="color: Red;">*</span>sparsely populated stretch of coast dotted with fishing villages and winter homes for foreigners. It missed<span style="color: Red;">*</span>the populated centers of Puerto Vallarta to its north and Manzanillo to the<span style="color: Red;">*</span>south, he said.
“This could have been far worse,” Feltgen said. “A little jog to the left, a little jog to the right and we’d be having a different conservation.”
By Sunday afternoon, six people were reported dead: two struck<span style="color: Red;">*</span>by a falling tree in the town of Tapalpa in southern Jalisco state and four others killed in a vehicle accident, according to the Spanish news agency EFE in Mexico.
Residents carry buckets on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2015, to help clean up a day after Hurricane Patricia passed through Mascota, Mexico, flooding homes. Mascota is between Puerto Vallarta and Guadelajara in the state of Jalisco.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: Michael Chow, The Republic)
Mexican authorities were relieved that the weekend storm was not comparable to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines two years ago, which was the same strength as Patricia but left more than 7,300 dead or missing and destroyed more than 1 million homes.
Mexican officials touted the mass evacuations from coastal centers as key to the low death count.
“The population responded. The hotels responded. The shipping industry responded,” Mexico’s Communications and Transportation Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Esparza said at a weekend news<span style="color: Red;">*</span>conference. “If we had not had that response, we would have had more incidents.”
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Patricia's rapid buildup in the Pacific also didn’t allow time for it to develop a substantial storm surge, Dan Pydynowski, a meteorologist with Accuweather.com, said Sunday. It’s often storm surge, not wind, that wreaks the most damage from hurricanes and leads to causalities, he said.
For example, Hurricane Katrina’s 28-foot storm surge when it landed on the Gulf Coast in 2005 pummeled towns from Bay St. Louis, Miss., to Grand Isle, La., overwhelmed federal levees in New Orleans and led to the storm’s more than 1,800 deaths.
Officials were still calculating Patricia’s storm surge, but it was believed to be far lower, because the hurricane developed so fast and the way Mexico’s Pacific Coast quickly drops off into deeper water, Pydynowski said.
“It’s usually the water and the flooding people get caught in,” he said.
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Work crews over the weekend replaced downed power lines and pumped water out of flooded homes along the impacted areas.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>But there was little sign here of flattened homes or widespread devastation.
In La Manzanilla, several beachside restaurants were crumpled,<span style="color: Red;">*</span>but others with thatched roofs remained intact. Coconuts still clung to palm trees, and even satellite dishes were still attached to the roofs of many homes.
Maria de Jesus Guzman, 70, and Andrés Aceves, 72, owners of Restaurant Aceves in La Manzanilla, Mex.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: Robert Hanashiro, USAT)
Maria de Jesus Guzman, 70, cleaned out what remains from the flooded seaside restaurant she runs with her husband, Andres Aceves. She rode out the storm with Aceves, their<span style="color: Red;">*</span>son and four grandchildren in a house up the road. It will take a while to get the restaurant back in shape, but she’s grateful the storm didn’t inflict<span style="color: Red;">*</span>more damage, she said.
“We’re alive,” Guzman said. “We thought it would be much worse.”
Casillas spent Friday night at her son’s house on a nearby hill.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>The storm roared unlike anything she’s ever heard, she said. Outside, they saw the wind bending trees and bouncing cars up and down in the street. She prayed with her family until it<span style="color: Red;">*</span>passed. “It was horrible,” she said.
As she and others ventured outside Saturday, she was stunned to see most of her town intact. The other astonishing fact: Not a single death in town.
“We’re still in shock,” Casillas said. “We have our lives. With life, there’s always hope.”
Contributing: David Agren in Monterrey, Mexico
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