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Acapulco Devastated By Cat-5 Hurricaine: “It looks like a war zone…”

In a story that is seemingly not getting much attention, Acapulco has been absolutely destroyed by Category 5 hurricane Otis.

Even MTG has turned weather reporter amidst the stunning destruction:

The videos and photos that are emerging are almost hard to believe:

This is what a Category 5 with 165mph winds can do:

Entire condos just GONE…

The contents now in the ocean or blown miles away.

I can’t recall the last time I saw something this bad:

“Catastrophic”:

The death toll currently sits at 27 and counting:

Look at the before and after of this building:

CNN estimates 80% of Acapulco has been severely destroyed:

New satellite images capture the scale of destruction Category 5 Hurricane Otis wrought in Acapulco and southern Mexico.

Few in history have endured a storm as strong as Otis – Acapulco never has. Its 165-mph winds and stronger gusts were akin to a slow-moving, 30-mile-wide, EF3 tornado.

At least 27 people were killed as the sea surged inland, urged forward by the storm’s wind which ripped and tore away at Acapulco’s skyline.

The city’s many high-rise hotels and residences which gleamed invitingly in the tropical sun before Otis are now mud-stained skeletons of concrete and twisted metal.

An estimated 80% of hotels in Acapulco have been severely damaged, Jorge Laurel, former president of the Acapulco Association of Hotels and Tourist Enterprises told CNN.

“This is a chaotic situation, a devastating scenario with unquantifiable damages,” Laurel told CNN. “There is no power, the entire electrical grid is semi-destroyed or totally destroyed.”

The unforecasted and exceptional suddenness by which Otis strengthened, fed by a warmer ocean, is a brutal example of the storms scientists say humans can expect in a climate changed by planet-warming pollution.

And it caught many off guard in Acapulco, some of whom are still missing. Melitón López came to the city Thursday to find his daughter Fátima who he had not heard from since the storm started its assault.

“She said, ‘I’m on the bridge, there’s a lot of damage, trees are falling, pieces of buildings are falling,’ and then we didn’t hear from her anymore,” López said.

Laurel estimated 40,000 visitors were in Acapulco before the storm hit, despite it being the offseason for tourism. A group of tourists told CNN they sheltered under a bridge for several hours as the storm raged around them after getting caught out while traveling back to their hotel via bus.

And from NPR:

The Category 5 storm slammed into the Pacific coast early Wednesday, killing at least 27 people, with at least four still missing, according to Mexican officials.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, pledged unlimited resources and thousands of troops. But residents and tourists in the city of 1 million people say they’ve received scant help.

The surprisingly powerful hurricane left little time to prepare and heavy damage in its wake. That’s made it difficult to access the city, leaving Acapulco with challenges of surviving the aftermath and eventually rebuilding the once-glamorous Pacific getaway.

We will continue to monitor this story…


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