Tropical Storm Roslyn, which made landfall in northwestern Mexico as a Category 3 hurricane on Sunday, killed at least two people and damaged homes and destroyed roads, before likely disappearing by evening.
“We found that one person died in Rosamorada,” Jorge Benito Rodriguez, Nayarit state’s security secretary, told state television.
The Citizen Protection and Fire Department later said an 80-year-old man died when a heavy structure collapsed in his home on the island of Mexcaltitán.
On Monday, Roslyn was 95km from the northern city of Torreon and had sustained winds of 55km/h. It should dissipate in the evening, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in the United States.
Roslyn had strengthened within hours on Friday into a Category 4 hurricane, putting authorities and residents in the states of Nayarit and Jalisco on high alert.
A hurricane of category greater than 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale (out of 5) is considered a potentially catastrophic “major” phenomenon. It was the first hurricane to reach this strength in the Pacific this season.
It made landfall around 11:20 a.m. near Santa Cruz (Nayarit state), where 1,200 people live, who live mainly from fishing and agriculture.
Material damage, some flooding, falling trees and landslides were reported by the civil protection authorities of the states of Nayarit and Jalisco (west), the most affected by the hurricane.
The floods “do not represent a risk as such”, indicated the director of civil protection of Nayarit, Pedro Núñez.
The resort of Puerto Vallarta (state of Jalisco), which has some 220,000 inhabitants and is one of the largest cities in the area affected by the hurricane, has begun to identify the damage.
Evacuations
“It was a bit scary. The water started to come into our house, we had to take our children out and put them up high […] we stayed in the rain for about three hours, my house was destroyed,” Erik Newcomer, an American who has lived in Puerto Vallarta for three months, told AFP.
In Sayulita, Nayarit, some areas were affected by the flooding of a stream, which buried houses.
More than a thousand residents of at-risk areas left their homes to join shelters or relatives’ homes, while commercial activities were suspended at the end of the afternoon.
Tropical cyclones hit Mexico every year on its Pacific and Atlantic coasts, usually between May and November.
At the end of May, Agatha, the first storm of the season in the Pacific, hit the coasts of the state of Oaxaca (south), where heavy rains in mountain towns killed 11 people. In October 1997, the 4-ranked Paulina devastated Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, killing more than 200 people.