Beryl has made landfall on the Yucatan Peninsula as a Category 2 hurricane, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory.
The hurricane was about 10 kilometres northeast of Mexico’s Caribbean coast resort of Tulum, packing maximum sustained winds of 175 km/h.
Beryl was the earliest Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a statement late Thursday warning of a possible direct hit on Tulum, which, while smaller than Cancun, still holds thousands of tourists and residents.
“It is recommendable that people get to higher ground, shelters or the homes of friends or family elsewhere,” López Obrador wrote. “Don’t hesitate, material possessions can be replaced.”
Tens of thousands in storm’s path
Once a sleepy, laid-back village, in recent years, Tulum has boomed with unrestrained development and now has about 50,000 permanent inhabitants and at least as many tourists on an average day. The resort now has its own international airport, but it is largely low-lying, just a few metres above sea level.
People in Mexico’s popular Yucatan Peninsula are bracing for Hurricane Beryl as it roars toward them after smashing through the Caribbean and killing at least 10 people.
Beryl was expected to weaken as it crossed over the Yucatan Peninsula and re-emerge in the Gulf of Mexico, where the surprisingly resilient storm could once again become a hurricane and make a second landfall around Mexico’s border with Texas next week.
As the wind began gusting over Tulum’s beaches, four-wheelers with megaphones rolled along the sand telling people to leave. Tourists snapped photos of the growing surf, but military personnel urged them to leave.
Authorities around the Yucatan Peninsula have prepared shelters, evacuated some small outlying coastal communities and even moved sea turtle eggs off beaches threatened by storm surge. In Tulum, authorities shut things down and evacuated beachside hotels.
‘We’ll be completely locked down’
Francisco Bencomo, general manager of Hotel Umi in Tulum, said all of their guests had left.
“With these conditions, we’ll be completely locked down,” he said, adding there were no plans to have guests return before July 10.
“We’ve cut the gas and electricity. We also have an emergency floor where two maintenance employees will be locking down,” he said from the hotel. “We have them staying in the room farthest from the beach and windows.”
“I hope we have the least impact possible on the hotel, that the hurricane moves quickly through Tulum, and that it’s nothing serious,” he said.
Tourists were also taking precautions. Lara Marsters, 54, a therapist visiting Tulum from Boise, Idaho, said “this morning we woke up and just filled all of our empty water bottles with water from the tap and put it in the freezer — so we will have water to flush the toilet.”
“We expect that the power will go out,” Marsters said. “We’re going to hunker down and stay safe.”
Wreaked havoc in Caribbean
Myriam Setra, 34, a tourist from Dallas, Texas, was having a sandwich on the beach earlier Thursday, and said, “Figured we’d get the last of the sun in today, too. And then it’s just going to be hunker down and just stay indoors until hopefully it passes.”
But once Beryl re-emerges into the Gulf of Mexico a day later, forecasters say it is again expected to build to hurricane strength and could hit right around the Mexico-U.S. border, at Matamoros. That area was already soaked in June by tropical storm Alberto.
Velazquez said temporary storm shelters were in place at schools and hotels but efforts to evacuate a few highly exposed villages — like Punta Allen, which sits on a narrow spit of land south of Tulum — and Mahahual, further south — had been only partially successful.
Earlier, Beryl wreaked havoc in the Caribbean. The hurricane damaged or destroyed 95 per cent of homes on a pair of islands in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, jumbled fishing boats in Barbados and ripped off roofs and knocked out electricity in Jamaica.
Three people were reported killed in Grenada and Carriacou and another in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, officials said. Three other deaths were reported in northern Venezuela, where four people were missing, officials said.
In the Pacific, tropical storm Aletta was located about 395 kilometres west of Manzanillo and had maximum sustained winds of 65 km/h, and was forecast to head away from land and dissipate by the weekend.