Mexico prepares for hurricane evacuation

A massive evacuation of tourists in one of the world’s biggest resorts was set to begin today, as hundreds of buses were dispatched to move tens of thousands out of the path of Hurricane Emily.

With the Category 4 storm expected to strike the Yucatan peninsula tonight, about 500 buses were ordered to move 30,000 tourists in Cancun – part of a total 70,000 to 80,000 mostly foreign tourists to be evacuated state-wide – to temporary shelters in ballrooms and convention centres.

“We have very little hope that this will change course,” said Cancun’s grim-faced mayor, Francisco Alor. “This hurricane is coming with same force as Gilbert,” a notorious 1988 hurricane that killed 300 people in Mexico and the Caribbean.

The last time Cancun faced a mass evacuation was 1988, when the city and surrounding resort areas were still fairly new and had only about 8,000 hotel rooms; that number has since grown to over 50,000.

Along the narrow spit of land that holds most of Cancun’s palatial hotels, workers scrambled to board up businesses and remove traffic lights along the eight-mile main strip, to keep them from becoming wind-borne projectiles when the hurricane hits.

“This hurricane isn’t going to take Cancun away from us,” Alor vowed.

Some three dozen of the city’s largest hotels were putting rows of beds in windowless meeting halls and ballrooms to shelter those evacuated from smaller hotels and exposed beach-side rooms.

On the island of Cozumel, just south of Cancun, tourists in beachside hotels were moved to accommodations closer to the centre of the island, which lies almost directly in the hurricane’s projected path.

An estimated 18,000 tourists streamed out of the Cancun airport on Saturday, and the terminal may close today as the hurricane draws closer. Some flights to Cancun have already been cancelled.

Improvised shelters were also prepared at about 170 schools and community centres to hold local residents who may be forced to flee their homes. Authorities said they had enough food ready to feed 60,000 to 70,000 people.

Mexico also launched a large-scale evacuation of offshore oil platforms, ordering 15,000 workers off oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and leaving less than a thousand attendants behind. The state-owned Pemex oil company said the move included closing 63 wells and halting the production of 480,000 barrels of oil per day.

Emily is expected to cross over the Yucatan peninsula before passing over the Gulf and hitting Mexico again – this time near the US border – later in the week.

On its passage through the Caribbean, Emily’s winds ravaged hundreds of homes on the island of Grenada, destroyed crops and killed at least one man whose home was buried under a landslide.

Dave Roberts, a meteorologist with the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami, said it was the strongest storm to form this early in the Atlantic season since record-keeping began in 1860.

By early today, Emily was about 480 miles east-south-east of Cozumel and moving toward the island at about 18mph, with winds of nearly 155mph.

Authorities had already evacuated some tourists from the mainland resorts of Tulum and Playa de Carmen, also south of Cancun, in some cases sending them as far away as Valladolid, a Yucatan city 100 miles.

About 1,800 people were evacuated from the islands of Contoy and Holbox, just off the coast.

Farther south, the government of Belize issued a tropical storm watch for the coast from Belize City northward to the Mexico border. In the capital, boats were being tied down or taken up river.

About 70% of the tourists being relocated in Mexico are foreigners; the evacuees will be given free food and lodging at shelters in convention centres or ballrooms, said Jesus Almaguer, president of the Cancun Hotel Association.

“It would be inhuman to charge them,” Almaguer said.