Men walk through a street following Hurricane Patricia's passage, in Francisco Villa, Jalisco, Mexico, on Saturday. (Ulises Ruiz Basurto/European Pressphoto Agency)
MEXICO CITY — As they catalogued the damage from the hemisphere’s most ferocious hurricane, Mexican authorities marveled that they escaped relatively unscathed.
By Sunday morning, Mexican officials had concluded that although a few thousand homes had been damaged by Hurricane Patricia, there had been no reported deaths or catastrophic loss of property. The dangerous storm’s magnitude — Category 5 — and wind speeds of as high as 200 mph had the power to wreak havoc, “and that, fortunately, has not occurred,” President Enrique Peña Nieto said.
“The preventive measures taken were the correct ones,” Peña Nieto said Saturday from the airport in the coastal city of Manzanillo, near where the hurricane made landfall. “Nature, above all, has been generous to Mexico.”
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Patricia’s effect was felt mostly in four coastal states: Colima, Jalisco, Michoacan and Nayarit. Peña Nieto said that about 3,500 homes were damaged. More than 200,000 people lost power, although half of them quickly regained it. All major roads, ports and airports along the coast were operating normally. Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, the communications and transportation secretary, said the storm passed “without major incidents.” Evacuation flights from the resort town of Puerto Vallarta on Saturday evening had several empty seats.
Authorities reported that between four and 11 inches of rain fell in various parts of the country, causing flooding and mud and rock slides. The winds and rain damaged banana plantations in Michoacan.
The storm came ashore in a sparsely populated area between Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta, then hit the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains and quickly lost strength. A tour of the impact zone Saturday revealed some homes damaged, billboards and trees knocked down, and rivers raging, but tourists had returned to their beach chairs and life along the coast was quickly returning to normal.