Tourists and locals in the Mexican town of Cabo San Lucas emerged from both shelters and gleaming resorts on Monday to assess the damage after Hurricane Odile roared through — the strongest ever to hit the Baja California peninsula.
Just after sunrise, it was still too early to get a sense of the destruction, but a local newspaper reported that people were hurt by flying glass and that a fire had broken out at the Cascadas resort. A phone call there from NBC News went unanswered.
Odile slammed into Cabo with 125 mph winds and dumped six months’ worth of rain in an hour. Mexican authorities evacuated coastal areas and readied shelters for up to 30,000 people.
At one shelter in Los Cabos, tourists crowded on the concrete stairs of a service area after the designated shelter area was destroyed.
Josh Morgerman, a California storm chaser, said his Cabo hotel lobby exploded in a “heap of rubble.” Writing on Twitter, he said he “escaped by crawling, scampering, running.”
Chelsea Ballenberger, a nurse from Alabama vacationing in the nearby city of La Paz, said she was forced to take refuge in the shower when her room flooded.
“As soon as we moved to the shower the windows shattered,” she wrote on Facebook. “We can hear the wind howling everywhere. ... Definitely the scariest thing I have ever been through.” Jason T. Vogt, a Canadian expatriate, simply described the scene as “total devastation” in a Facebook post.
Nick Wiltgen, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel, said he was monitoring “mind-boggling” reports of 11 inches of rain in just one hour — almost as much as the region’s yearly average of 13 inches. While this measurement could be due to storm-damaged equipment, he said reports of 7 inches were believable.
The storm was bearing down on La Paz, a city of 200,000 people, at 5:30 a.m. ET but was expected to weaken as it headed up the peninsula through Tuesday. The U.S. Southwest could see heavy rain and flash flooding on Tuesday.
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