Clear-up Underway after Patricia Hit Mexico

Annie Weaver and seven of her family members vacated their Nuevo Vallarta hotel Saturday afternoon and waited for hours in an underground garage and employee center as they braced for Hurrican Patricia, a potentially catastrophic storm that appeared to be headed their direction.

Hurricane Patricia continues to weaken, dropping to a Category 1 storm as it crosses Mexico.

“Maybe (the warnings) were exaggerated, but it’s better to be warned”, said Ruben Fregoso, a restaurant owner who reopened his business in the popular resort of Puerto Vallarta after the storm.

The Sokols, a family of five from suburban Detroit, were supposed to fly out of Puerto Vallarta on Friday but ended up hunkering down for hours in a shelter at a university after their flight was canceled. Patricia’s centre made landfall in a relatively low-populated stretch of the Jalisco state coast near Cuixmala.

In an image provided by NASA, Hurricane Patricia is shown from the global Space Station.

Hurricane Patricia has made landfall on the coast of Mexico, with hundreds of thousands of people in the path of one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded, according to the The Guardian.

In Puerto Vallarta, where 15,000 tourists had been hastily evacuated on Friday night, hotel workers began sweeping up the debris and removing boards from windows as the sun peeked out of the clouds.

While the storm lost power before coming ashore, its magnitude as a category 5 storm placed it in the strongest category on the Saffir-Simpson scale, a rare occurrence capable of causing massive destruction.

The hurricane’s maximum sustained winds were recorded at 200mph (325kph) at one point, but the storm weakened as it approached land.

The upper low-pressure system that brought rain to Las Vegas at the start of last week will push precipitation from Patricia well to the east, meteorologist Justin Pullin said. So far there have been no reports of deaths or major damage from the storm, suggesting that the wide-scale evacuations and other preparations conducted by Mexican officials were successful.

Hurricane Patricia, the strongest weather disturbance in recorded history, roared into southwestern part of Mexico on Friday, unleashing devastating winds and rains to an area where luxury resorts and impoverished villages are located.

“I was feeling safe in the morning but not so much right now”, he said.

Patricia became a tropical storm on Thursday and strengthened with stunning speed as it closed in on the Mexican coast.

Patricia peaked at 325 kph several hours earlier – more powerful than the 315 kph winds of Super Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,350 dead or missing when it struck the Philippines in November 2013.