San Pedro Sula, Honduras – Hurricane Felix came ashore on Nicaragua’s remote Miskito Coast early Tuesday as a Category 5 storm, damaging about 5,000 homes in the region before moving westward toward the heart of this country of 7 million people, officials said.
Less than nine hours later and more than 1,600 miles away in the Pacific, a second and much weaker hurricane, Henriette, struck the resort city of San Jose del Cabo on the southern tip of Baja California.
The center of Henriette’s eye reached the Baja mainland Tuesday afternoon about 6 miles east of San Jose del Cabo’s downtown.
It was the first time Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes had made landfall on the same day since the U.S. National Hurricane Center began keeping records in 1949, according to The Associated Press.
Packing 160-mph winds as it made landfall, Felix quickly lost power and was downgraded to a tropical storm as it advanced over the sparsely populated mountains along the Nicaraguan-Honduran border. The storm nonetheless threatened to cause severe flooding as it passed near Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, later Tuesday evening.
In Nicaragua, officials said 5,500 structures had been damaged in Puerto Cabezas and other coastal cities. At least three people had been killed. Honduran and Nicaraguan officials had evacuated thousands of tourists and residents from seaside towns all along the Miskito Coast beginning Monday.
As many as 60,000 tourists, most of them Americans, remained in the resorts at the southern tip of Baja California as Henriette neared, Mexican officials said.
Angel Marquez Cervantes, chief of staff to the city government in Cabo San Lucas, said officials there had begun mandatory evacuations of 2,000 people from hotels and low-lying city neighborhoods.
“We had some problems because a lot of people didn’t want to leave their houses,” Marquez Cervantes said. “But when we’re on red alert, we evacuate them whether they want to or not. We’d rather they be angry with us but safe.”
