Wilma slams Mexico resorts as tourists flee

[Menydh]

Wilma slams Mexico resorts as tourists flee

Reuters
October 21, 2005

CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) - Lashing wind and rain pounded Mexican beach resorts on Friday and thousands of tourists hunkered down in shelters to escape Hurricane Wilma, which was hammering Caribbean resorts on its way to densely populated southern Florida.

Heavy rain was coming down in diagonal sheets and howling winds were buckling sturdy trees.

Tourists were evacuated from luxury beachfront hotels all along Mexico's "Maya Riviera" coast and the normally calm, turquoise Caribbean seas heaved and Wilma dumped rain on streets patrolled by soldiers ordering people to take cover.

Described by forecasters as extremely dangerous and at its height later on Friday expected to send a 10-foot (3-metre)surge of water over the coast, Wilma killed 10 people in mudslides in Haiti earlier in the week.

Cuba evacuated 220,000 people and residents of southern Florida stocked up on drinking water and gas to prepare for Wilma, which hammered the coasts of Mexico and Belize with winds of around 150 mph (240 kph).

Mexican authorities said close to 22,000 tourists and locals residents had been evacuated from low-lying coastal areas. In one gymnasium shelter in Cancun, 1,600 people spent the night on mattresses on the floor. One local entrepreneur sold T-shirts, perhaps prematurely, with the logo: "I survived Hurricane Wilma," at $10 each.

About 100 bored-looking foreign tourists stood talking in groups under chandeliers in the cavernous marble lobby of the Hotel Royal Porto Real, near the sea front in Playa del Carmen, another resort just south of Cancun.

"It was meant to be the fortnight holiday of a lifetime," said 28-year-old Simon Hayes, one of four friends on holiday from Britain. "This is not how I envisaged it working out."

Conditions were far tougher for hundreds of migrant construction workers, mostly from the impoverished southern state of Chiapas, who were evacuated from temporary digs in outdoor camps and building sites.


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Hurricane Wilma

Image by NASA\'s Earth Observatory

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