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MEXICO – Hurricane Willa hit the Mexican Pacific coast on Tuesday night with winds blowing at 150 km / h and heavy rains threatening to cause flooding.
The eye of the storm landed around 9 pm. EDT, near Isla del Bosque in Sinaloa State, announced the US National Hurricane Center. Willa reached the coast as Category 3, the first major hurricane of the Pacific season to reach Mexico.
The storm is expected to subside rapidly on mountainous terrain and dissipate on Wednesday over northern Mexico, the hurricane center said.
In anticipation of the storm, schools have been closed since Monday, shelter centers and emergency response teams have been prepared.
Luis Felipe Puente, national civil protection officer, said Tuesday afternoon that more than 4,250 people living in vulnerable areas had been evacuated to shelters or homes of friends and relatives. He recommended businesses and tourism activities to close in the early afternoon and warned citizens against the need to rush to buy last minute supplies or gasoline.
"The best thing to do is stay here tonight," he said.
The states of Nayarit and Sinaloa are expected to face the shock of the storm, officials said, but other states, including Jalisco, would feel an impact. The authorities estimated that there were about 40,000 foreign and domestic tourists in these states, which are home to the resorts of Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán.
The storm, which reached Category 5 on Monday, took place earlier on Tuesday on the Islas Marias, an archipelago of four islands including a nature reserve and a federal prison.
Puente said the islands had suffered minor damage to infrastructure but no loss of life.
Authorities in the states of Nayarit, Sinaloa and Jalisco closed the schools from Monday in some municipalities and began to set up shelters. The Interior Ministry has declared the state of emergency for 12 municipalities of Nayarit and Sinaloa seven, thus giving them access to emergency funds.
Thousands of members of the army and navy, as well as the federal police, were present in the states of Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit and Sinaloa. The government has closed ports in the region and canceled several flights to Mazatlán and Tepic, the capital of the state of Nayarit.
The state-owned electricity utility, CFE, said more than 2,000 workers were prepared to deal with power outages in Nayarit, Sinaloa and other potentially affected states. The utility has moved hundreds of cranes, trucks and rescue units to the area.
A separate meteorological event that threatened Mexico, tropical storm Vicente, collapsed overnight and its remains were moved inland Tuesday on the state of Michoacán.
According to Mr. Puente, 11 people were reportedly killed in recent days in the state of Oaxaca, in the south of the country, where floods caused by Vicente and other weather events damaged houses and homes. roads. The states of Guerrero and Michoacán have also been affected by floods and landslides, but no casualties have been reported, he added.
In September, a tropical depression that formed in the Gulf of California caused many floods in northern Sinaloa.
Write to Anthony Harrup at [email protected]
