Mountains and planning lessened punch by Hurricane Patricia

LA MANZANILLA, Mexico — Mountains, geography and planning led to surprisingly little damage and few deaths when Hurricane Patricia, the strongest storm on record in the Western Hemisphere, slammed ashore with 165-mph winds.

Experts say Mexico's mountains and quick mass evacuations saved lives over the weekend. But ask local residents and they say prayer played a role.

“God takes care of us,” said Yolanda Garcia Casillas, 49, who rode out the storm in this seaside community 20 miles south from where the storm made landfall.

Above-average warm waters of the Pacific along with very little wind shear combined to quickly build Patricia into a monster storm with 200-mph winds as it approached Mexico’s coast, Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Sunday.

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But as it approached the coast Friday evening, the storm’s circular winds collided with the Sierra Madre Occidental range, just as quickly weakening it, he said. The storm came ashore near Cuixmala at 6:15 p.m. Friday as a Category 5 hurricane with 165-mph winds — the same strength storm as Hurricane Andrew when it struck South Florida in 1992, he said.

Unlike that sprawling storm, Patricia had a compact eye only 5 nautical miles across, and its strongest winds extended just 15 miles from the eye, Feltgen said. As it crashed with the mountains, the hurricane fell apart. By 4 a.m. Saturday, it weakened to a Category 1 storm with 75-mph winds and was depleted to a post-tropical depression that afternoon, he said.

Patricia also picked the best possible place to arrive: a sparsely populated stretch of coast dotted with fishing villages and winter homes for foreigners. It missed the populated centers of Puerto Vallarta to its north and Manzanillo to the south, he said.

“This could have been far worse,” Feltgen said. “A little jog to the left, a little jog to the right and we’d be having a different conservation.”

By Sunday afternoon, six people were reported dead: two struck by a falling tree in the town of Tapalpa in southern Jalisco state and four others killed in a vehicle accident, according to the Spanish news agency EFE in Mexico.

Mexican authorities were relieved that the weekend storm was not comparable to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines two years ago, which was the same strength as Patricia but left more than 7,300 dead or missing and destroyed more than 1 million homes.

Mexican officials touted the mass evacuations from coastal centers as key to the low death count.

“The population responded. The hotels responded. The shipping industry responded,” Mexico’s Communications and Transportation Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Esparza said at a weekend news conference. “If we had not had that response, we would have had more incidents.”

Monster Hurricane Patricia makes landfall in Mexico

Patricia's rapid buildup in the Pacific also didn’t allow time for it to develop a substantial storm surge, Dan Pydynowski, a meteorologist with Accuweather.com, said Sunday. It’s often storm surge, not wind, that wreaks the most damage from hurricanes and leads to causalities, he said.

For example, Hurricane Katrina’s 28-foot storm surge when it landed on the Gulf Coast in 2005 pummeled towns from Bay St. Louis, Miss., to Grand Isle, La., overwhelmed federal levees in New Orleans and led to the storm’s more than 1,800 deaths.

Officials were still calculating Patricia’s storm surge, but it was believed to be far lower, because the hurricane developed so fast and the way Mexico’s Pacific Coast quickly drops off into deeper water, Pydynowski said.

“It’s usually the water and the flooding people get caught in,” he said.

Patricia leaves some tourists stranded, others eager to vacation

Work crews over the weekend replaced downed power lines and pumped water out of flooded homes along the impacted areas. But there was little sign here of flattened homes or widespread devastation.

In La Manzanilla, several beachside restaurants were crumpled, but others with thatched roofs remained intact. Coconuts still clung to palm trees, and even satellite dishes were still attached to the roofs of many homes.

Maria de Jesus Guzman, 70, cleaned out what remains from the flooded seaside restaurant she runs with her husband, Andres Aceves. She rode out the storm with Aceves, their son and four grandchildren in a house up the road. It will take a while to get the restaurant back in shape, but she’s grateful the storm didn’t inflict more damage, she said.

“We’re alive,” Guzman said. “We thought it would be much worse.”

Casillas spent Friday night at her son’s house on a nearby hill. The storm roared unlike anything she’s ever heard, she said. Outside, they saw the wind bending trees and bouncing cars up and down in the street. She prayed with her family until it passed. “It was horrible,” she said.

As she and others ventured outside Saturday, she was stunned to see most of her town intact. The other astonishing fact: Not a single death in town.

“We’re still in shock,” Casillas said. “We have our lives. With life, there’s always hope.”

Contributing: David Agren in Monterrey, Mexico