Eye of Hurricane Dean strikes Yucatan Peninsula

Hurricane Dean ploughed into the Caribbean coast of Mexico today as a roaring Category 5 hurricane, lashing ancient Mayan ruins and heading for modern oil installations.

Hurricane specialist Daniel Brown, of the US National Hurricane Centre, said the eye of the storm reached the coast and officials were working to pinpoint the exact location near Chetumal.

Dean had sustained winds of 160 mph as it closed on the Yucatan Peninsula just north of the Mexico-Belize border.

The hurricane has killed at least 12 people across the Caribbean, picked up strength after brushing Jamaica and the Cayman Islands and became a monstrous Category 5 hurricane yesterday.

Category 5 storms – capable of catastrophic damage – are extremely rare. Only three have hit the US since 1935.

Thousands of tourists fled from the beaches of the Mayan Riviera. Though expected to escape a direct hit, Cancun still could face destructive winds.

State civil protection official Francisco de la Cruz described battering winds from his hurricane-proof offices in Chetumal just before the eye reached land.

“There’s a lot of noisy wind now with this creature all over us,” he said.

Meteorologists said a storm surge of 12 to 18 feet was possible at the storm’s centre, which could push sea water deep inland. Heavy rains threatened to inundate the swampy region.

The storm was expected to slash across the Yucatan Peninsula and emerge in the Gulf of Campeche, where Petroleos Mexicanos decided to shut down production on the offshore rigs that extract most of the nation’s oil – resulting in a production loss of 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day.

Central Mexico was next on the storm’s path, though the outer bands were likely to bring rain, flooding and gusty winds to southern Texas.

This morning, Dean threatened the Yucatan’s most vulnerable population – the Mayan people – many of whom have seen little of the riches from oil or tourism, and still live in traditional wooden slat huts in small settlements all over this low-lying area.

President Felipe Calderon said he would cut short a trip to Canada where he is meeting with US President George Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and travel to the areas where the hurricane is expected to hit.

A hurricane warning was in effect from Cancun all the way south through Belize, as well as parts of the Yucatan’s western coast.

In Belize, the government evacuated Caye Caulker and Ambergris Caye – both popular with US tourists – urged people to leave low-lying areas and ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew from Belize City to the Mexican border.

Authorities evacuated Belize City’s three hospitals and were moving high-risk patients inland to the nation’s capital, Belmopan, founded after 1961’s Hurricane Hattie devastated Belize City.

Mayor Zenaida Moya urged residents to leave Belize City, saying it did not have shelters strong enough to withstand a storm of Dean’s size.

At the southern tip of Texas, sandbags were distributed in the resort town of South Padre Island, and residents were urged to evacuate.

“Our mission is very simple. It’s to get people out of the kill zone, to get people out of the danger area, which is the coastline of Texas,” said Johnny Cavazos, chief emergency director of Cameron County.

In Mexico during the past three days, officials put more than 50,000 people on flights leaving various parts of the Yucatan peninsula, the federal Communications and Transportation Department said in a statement.

Though expected to escape a direct hit, Cancun still could face destructive winds, since the storm swirled over 75,000 square miles.

Cancun’s tourist strip is still marked with cranes used to repair the damage from 2005’s Hurricane Wilma, which caused $3bn (€2.2bn) in losses. Dean is expected to be even stronger than Wilma, which stalled over Cancun and pummelled it for a day.

The worst storm to hit Latin America in modern times was 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, which killed nearly 11,000 people and left more than 8,000 missing, most in Honduras and Nicaragua.