MAJAHUAL, Mexico — Hurricane Dean swept across the Yucatan peninsula Tuesday, toppling trees, power lines and houses as it bore down on the heart of Mexico’s oil industry. Glitzy resorts on the Mayan Riviera were spared, but vulnerable Mayan villages were exposed to the full fury of the intense storm.
Dean’s projected path is 400 miles south of Texas, where only heavy surf was expected.
Dean was the third-most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall since record keeping began in the 1850s. It had a minimum central pressure of 906 millibars, the third-lowest at landfall after the 1935 Labor Day hurricane in the Florida Keys and Hurricane Gilbert, which hit Cancun in 1988.
President Felipe Calderon said no deaths were immediately reported in Mexico, after Dean killed 13 people in the Caribbean. But driving rain, poor communications and impassable roads made it difficult to determine how isolated Mayan communities fared in the sparsely populated jungle where Dean made landfall as a ferocious Category 5 hurricane.
One of a handful people to ignore military orders to evacuate, she weathered the storm in her new brick-walled house with her husband and 7-month-old baby. Winds of 165 mph — with gusts of 200 mph, faster than the takeoff speed of many passenger jets — blew out windows and pulled pieces from their roof.
Hundreds of homes were collapsed in Majahual when Dean’s eye passed almost directly overhead.
Dean weakened over land but was expected to strengthen as its eye moved over the Bay of Campeche, home to more than 100 oil platforms and three major oil exporting ports. The sprawling, westward storm was projected to slam into the mainland this afternoon with renewed force near Laguna Verde, Mexico’s only nuclear power plant.
Tuesday night, Dean had winds of 80 mph and was centered about 110 miles west of Campeche. It was moving west at 20 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.
While 50,000 tourists were safely evacuated from resorts on the Yucatan peninsula, many poor Indians closer to the storm’s direct path refused military orders to leave their homes, according to Gen. Alfonso Garcia, who was running shelters in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 60 miles northwest of Majahual.
Troops evacuated more than 250 small communities, and 8,000 people took refuge in 500 shelters, said Jorge Acevedo, a Quintana Roo state spokesman. Others turned away soldiers with machetes and refused to leave, but some of them changed their minds when the winds and rain intensified, he said.
Little was known about the thousands who rode out the storm in low-lying communities of stick huts.
Dean’s path takes it directly through the Cantarell oil field, Mexico’s most productive. The entire field’s operations were shut down just ahead of the storm, reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas.
Dean hit Mexico early Tuesday along a sparsely populated coastline, well to the south of major resorts. The brunt of the storm struck the state capital of Chetumal, where residents spent a harrowing night with windows shattering and heavy water tanks flying off rooftops. Sirens wailed for hours as the storm battered the city, hurling billboards down streets.
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