Mexico City, Oct 25 (EFE).- Communications have been lost in areas along the Pacific coast of Mexico that have been struck by Hurricane Otis, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Wednesday.
The storm, which has been downgraded to category 2, made landfall Wednesday in the southern state of Guerrero as one of the most powerful cyclones in the history of the Pacific.
“The hurricane hit very hard in Guerrero, in the Costa Grande, in Acapulco, in Tecpan, in that whole stretch (…) communications have been completely lost,” he said.
Otis, now a category 2 hurricane, went from being a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours, as it headed towards the coast of Guerrero, where it affected densely populated areas.
The president stated that “rarely has a hurricane developed so soon and with such force”.
“It is a very strong hurricane, and it had an atypical behavior – this was reported to us at 8am or 9am, that it was going to intensify very soon,” he said. “This has not happened in decades.”
The president has sent the heads of the Ministry of National Defense, the Navy, Security and Citizen Protection, Communications and Transport, and the National Coordination of Civil Protection to the area.
The hurricane registered maximum sustained winds of 175 kilometers (108 miles) per hour (kph) with gusts of 195 kph while heading north-northwest at 17 kilometers per hour.
Mexico’s National Meteorology Service (SMN) has warned of “extraordinary” rains, over 250 millimeters in Guerrero, as well as “intense” precipitation in Michoacán and the southwest of the State of Mexico. EFE
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