Its passage was brief, but Hurricane Roslyn, which made landfall on Sunday October 23 in northwestern Mexico, killed at least two people and caused extensive damage to houses and roads, notably causing intense rains and mudslides.
“We found that one person died in Rosamorada”, Nayarit state security secretary Jorge Benito Rodriguez 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 morning at 2 a.m. Paris time, Roslyn was 95 km from the city of Torreon, in the north of the country, and had sustained winds of 55 km / h. It should dissipate in the evening, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in the United States.
Winds of 195 km/h
Roslyn had strengthened in a few hours Friday into a category 4 hurricane, putting the authorities and the inhabitants of the states of Nayarit and Jalisco on 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 1:20 p.m. (Paris time) near Santa Cruz (State of Nayarit), where 1,200 people live, who depend mainly on fishing and agriculture. SThe winds reached 195 km/h according to the NHC.
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. Flooding “do not represent a risk as such”said the director of civil protection of Nayarit, Pedro Núñez.
Thousands of residents evacuated
The seaside 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.
“It was a bit scary. The water started to enter our house, we had to take our children out and put them on high ground (…) we stayed in the rain for about three hours, my house was destroyed”, told Agence France-Presse, Erik Newcomer, an American living in Puerto Vallarta for three months. In Sayulita, in Nayarit, certain sectors 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 eleven people. In October 1997, the 4-ranked Paulina devastated Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, killing more than 200 people.