CANCUN, Mexico – Tens of thousands of tourists evacuated their luxury beach hotels, and locals took shelter in schools and community centers Sunday night as Hurricane Emily bore down on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula with howling winds and driving rain.
Packing winds up to 150 mph, the unusually powerful early season storm was expected to smash into the peninsula near Cozumel island late Sunday or early Monday. Already, Emily has been blamed for the deaths of at least seven people as it has churned northwest across the Caribbean.
Mexican officials were rushing to evacuate 90,000 people throughout Quintana Roo state, including 30,000 tourists from Cancun and the Mayan Riviera. Local governments dispatched hundreds of buses Sunday to ferry tens of thousands of tourists to inland hotels, schools and a convention center. Tens of thousands more tourists fled the state between Friday and Sunday.
At Cancun’s international airport, hundreds of anxious travelers waited in line Sunday to catch one of the few remaining outbound flights before the storm’s predicted arrival.
“We’re on the last train out of Dodge,” said Joe McHenry, 63, emeritus director of the Dallas Margarita Society, a philanthropic organization, as he and 140 other group members waited to depart on a midafternoon charter flight.
Pemex, Mexico’s oil monopoly, shut down 63 oil wells in the southern Gulf of Mexico and evacuated 15,000 workers from offshore rigs. Two helicopter pilots were killed in a Saturday night crash caused by strong winds during the evacuations.
At one point, Emily was on the verge of being declared a Category 5 hurricane, the most intense type, characterized by wind speeds in excess of 155 mph and capable of knocking over buildings. Such storms are a rarity in the Caribbean this time of year. But Emily’s winds were reportedly weakening slightly as it approached Mexico.
Emily, the season’s second major hurricane, follows only days after Hurricane Dennis pummeled Cuba, Haiti and Florida, killing at least 46 people, according to an Associated Press tally. If Emily continues on its present course, weather forecasters expect the storm to cross the Gulf of Mexico and make landfall again somewhere between northeastern Mexico and southern Texas later this week.
Some here were critical of the weekend’s evacuation effort, saying they believed that Mexican officials had been caught off guard by Emily’s ferocity and had not given the public adequate warning.
Mark Wilson, a jet-ski tour guide and former Florida resident who now lives in Cancun, said he had been following Emily’s progress on the Internet and on television and didn’t like what he was seeing.
“If this thing doesn’t take a dip north or south, this is going to be a catastrophic event,” Wilson said. “The Mexican government should have evacuated this whole place. It’s completely irresponsible.”
Richard Napier, 35, and his wife Shakyryn, 26, from Arlington, Texas, planned to ride out the storm playing Scrabble.
“We’re going to miss some of our vacation,” Shakyryn said, “but some of these people are going to lose their homes. That really puts it in perspective.”
In this city’s Colonia Bonfil, a poor neighborhood of cinderblock homes and wood-and-cardboard shanties a world away from the glittering resort hotels, several residents seemed unfazed by the hurricane’s menacing advance.
Gabriel Rolon Ricardez, an 18-year-old construction worker, said he and his family would be staying at their neighbors’ cinderblock house. Speaking of his own family’s three-room, tin-roofed shack, he said: “If it gets destroyed, we’ll rebuild it. There’s nothing else we can do.”
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