Cabo San Lucas, Mexico – Hurricane-force winds slammed into the southern tip of Baja California on Friday night, as a powerful Pacific storm forced tourists to take shelter in luxury hotel ballrooms and local residents in vacant schoolhouses.
Hurricane John, packing sustained winds of 110 mph, was churning near the tip of Baja and its outer edge was already being felt on land, forecasters said.
Bands of steady rain swelled normally dry stream beds and ran down some streets as the eye of the Category 2 hurricane drew within about 25 miles of San Jose del Cabo Friday night. John wasn’t likely to affect the United States; cooler Pacific waters tend to diminish storms before they reach California.
Known for the rugged beauty of their unique desert-ocean landscapes, the two resort cities of San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip of the Baja peninsula are studded with high-end golf courses. The resorts are extremely popular with sports fishermen and celebrities. Rooms at some of the higher end hotels go for more than $2,000 a night.
Winds toppled the signs of shops and businesses sent metal gates flying in San Jose Del Cabo, while bands of rain swept ashore in nearby Cabo San Lucas.
On Friday, thousands of tourists who couldn’t get flights out prepared to ride out the storm.
“That water wasn’t that high a few minutes ago,” said Dale Broomfield, 26, a nurse from Adelaide, Australia, who negotiated a makeshift plank bridge over water that rose up between his hotel and an adjoining convention hall-turned-shelter in Cabo San Lucas.
Nearby, Guadalupe Amezcua, a 50-year-old tourist from Mexico City, set up camp on one of many mattresses on the floor of the hall, where windowless rooms provided protection from wind.
“This is like an adventure for us, but I’ve learned now: never travel during hurricane season,” Amezcua said as she folded her clothes.
“We came for the sun – and now look!” Miles away from the glittering coastal hotels, 46-year-old bricklayer Francisco Casas Perez sat outside a schoolroom where he and his 14-year-old son spent the night. They were evacuated from their tin-roofed shack in Tierra y Libertad, one of the squatters camps that dot the sandy flats around Cabo San Lucas.
“We’ve been asking God to not let it hit too hard,” he said.
“We could lose all our possessions.” The Mexican Navy and police evacuated residents, sometimes forcibly, from Tierra y Libertad and other shantytowns, many of which are built next to usually dry riverbeds.
Casas Perez went voluntarily to the shelter, where people slept on thin pads stretched side-by-side over the concrete floor.
“The hurricane is no game, especially where we are surrounded by water on all sides,” he said.
Olga Lidia Aguilar, 32, was evacuated from her tar-paper shack in the shantytown of Lagunita.
“We feel safer here,” she said as she and her five children waited in line for free tuna salad and tortillas. “Our house could just blow away in the wind.” Up to 8,000 tourists remained in Cabo San Lucas on Friday; hundreds more foreigners are full-time residents. Most visitors are American.
As the storm approached, the Hotel Tesoro told guests they could stay in their rooms at their own risk, but suggested they go the hotel’s shelter or hunker down in their bathrooms.
The towns’ shops and restaurants were almost all closed, many with their windows boarded up. Hotel workers stripped rooms of light fixtures and furniture, in case plate-glass windows shattered.
Officials closed the airport Thursday night, ending a mad scramble for last-minute flights, and driving out wasn’t an option for many – the one, narrow road north stretches 400 miles to Tijuana on the U.S. border. A tropical storm warning was in effect for the desolate middle stretch of the peninsula, a region dotted with American-owned vacation and retirement homes.
The National Hurricane Center warned that John could fuel storm surges of up to 5 feet above normal tide and bring 6 to 10 inches of rain, possibly causing “life-threatening flash floods and mudslides” over mountainous areas.
Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Kristy churned farther out in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, with maximum sustained winds of 58 mph, and forecasters at the U.S. Hurricane Center in Miami said it could eventually be absorbed by John.
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