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PLAYA DEL CARMEN (Mexico), Oct 21: Hurricane Wilma’s ferocious winds battered Mexico’s famed Caribbean beach resorts on Friday, knocking over trees and signposts and trapping thousands of nervous tourists in cramped shelters.
Powerful waves swallowed up white sand beaches in the popular resort of Cancun and howling winds tore across the island of Cozumel, a favorite of scuba divers and cruise ship passengers.
All along the “Maya Riviera”, sturdy tropical trees danced in the wild wind and others lay toppled in empty and flooded streets. Electricity was cut and signposts were sent spinning through the air.
“I’m okay, I’m okay — don’t worry,” Italian tourist Manuel Sanilli, dressed in black rain gear, screamed down a payphone to his family in Rome as he gripped on to the wall behind him in Playa del Carmen resort, south of Cancun.
“Mother of God! My family says they’re praying for me,” he said after hanging up, his hands clasped together in prayer.
Forecasters warned of catastrophic damage as Wilma, a Category 4 hurricane, moved in from the Caribbean with winds of 225kph. The storm’s center was just southeast of Cozumel on Friday and it was expected to crash into the coast later in the day.
“The sound of the wind is what is frightening,” said Rossy Mischne, holed up inside the Cozumel hotel where she works.
On the same island, 18 dolphins evacuated from their sea enclosure swam around in hotel swimming pools.
Emergency officials warned the slow-moving storm could linger over the Yucatan peninsula and dump torrential rains across southern Mexico, raising the risk of lethal mudslides and damage to coffee crops in an area already devastated by Hurricane Stan earlier this month.
HOT, LEAKING SHELTERS: At one sweltering gymnasium in Cancun, around 1,600 people lay on mattresses eating canned food and sweating in the dank heat, many stripped down to bathing suits or underwear.
Some worried whether the walls would hold up, while a more optimistic local entrepreneur sold T-shirts with the hopeful logo: “I Survived Hurricane Wilma.”
“I wish it would get a move on. It’s frustrating,” said British software salesman Rob Stevens. “We’ve come a long way and now we are sitting here in a hot, damp, leaking building. No one seems to know how long it will be.”
Mexican emergency officials said more than 50,000 people were evacuated and about 17,000 were put in shelters such as schools, gymnasiums and hotel conference rooms further inland.
Hundreds of construction workers, most from the southern state of Chiapas, were moved from their temporary lodgings in outdoor camps and building sites in Playa del Carmen.
In a kindergarten classroom near the beach, 50 men sat on the concrete floor, too cramped to lie down, eating with their hands from cans of donated tuna fish. “This sucks,” said Juan Cruz Perez, 21, a metal worker from nearby Tabasco state.
The storm was expected to dump 25 to 50cms of rain across the Yucatan and isolated areas of mountainous western Cuba. Some areas could get up to 100cms, the US National Hurricane Center said in Miami.—Reuters
