No significant damage reported from Mexico record storm

When Patricia struck the coast, its winds slowed to 270 kilometers per hour, and gradually lost steam as it moved inland.

The storms winds and rain were expected to add their weight to the bad weather for Sunday’s Formula One Grand Prix in Austin, Texas across the border in the United States.

In Jalisco, which bore the brunt of the hurricane, a few rivers rose, damaging a bridge and a few 250 homes in one community of 600 people, said state government secretary general Roberto Lopez Lara.

Damage from the hurricane was lower than expected, but rural areas were hard hit.

” ‘You had to feel how the air trembled, ‘ said Yael Barragan, a trucking service coordinator in the port city of Manzanillo, huddled in his home with five children and four other adults”. Trees and utility poles were toppled.

Patricia became a tropical storm on Thursday and quickly gained tremendous power as it closed in on the Mexican coast.

People snapped selfies next to an iconic sculpture overlooking the sea and business owners swept sidewalks as they would on any morning. Puddles dotted the downtown district, but nothing more than a passing thunderstorm might leave.

Patricia plunged ashore about 65 miles (110 kilometers) southeast of Vallarta, which was protected from much of the fury by mountains.

The hurricane made landfall on the Pacfic coast of Mexico on October 23. “It was not a densely populated area”, Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the hurricane center, told The Associated Press.

Maximiliano Macedo of Puerto Vallarta strolled arm in arm with his wife down the waterfront unable to resist the curiosity of seeing things by the light of day.

He said the lack of fatalities was probably the result of the storm’s narrow footprint.

Mowing down trees, flooding streets and battering buildings, Patricia hit land as a Category 5 hurricane on Friday evening before grinding inland. “It ran into the mountains and that completely disrupted the circulation”, Feltgen said.

Patricia was located about 155 km northeast of the central city of Zacatecas, heading rapidly northeast at 39 kph, the center said.

That such a monster storm could inflict so little harm seemed wondrous.

The relatively mild outcome of Hurricane Patricia came as a relief to Mexican authorities.

Ontario native Arthur Fumerton lives in Puerto Vallarta and says the weather is handsome and sunny today, hours after the Category 5 storm made landfall Friday night.

Patricia has been compared to Typhoon Haiyan, which barreled across the Philippines in 2013 killing more than 7000 people, and Hurricane Wilma, which hit the Atlantic basin in 2005, killing 87.