165 mph winds. May strengthen before landfall, which will be close to dead center Acapulco, a town of 1 million.
There will be a lot of questions about how the models missed the extremely speedy intensification of Otis. Well, models are based on prior data. The conditions have changed such that the models don't recognize the new. This has been happening in wildland fire for a few years now and we will only see more of it across various types of phenomena tied to climate change. It will be cheaper and less disruptive to make rapid change now to dramatically reduce emissions and ruggedize communities than it will be to deal with the uncertainty, damage, and displacement that is coming if we continue to pretend this is only a gradual thing we're dealing with. Make your individual/family long term plans and investments accordingly.
Some tracks have Otis hitting just north of Acapulco, like where the 200 is on this map. That would expose the bay to the strongest winds. (You can follow along on windy.com, which has a wave feature.)
Otis hit just south of Acapulco, but had wind gusts of 205 mph. Here are the models and the actual intensification.
Keep in mind we’re just seeing images from the built up/resort part of Acapulco. Haven’t seen much from neighborhoods and other parts of the town.
Two giant late season storms hitting the west coast of Mexico in the last 10 years is wild -- Hurricane Patricia was the strongest storm ever (wind 215)... crazy.
Over 20 confirmed fatalities as of now and reports are that there was massive damage to utility lines and poles. The whole town is dark and will be for some time.
The destruction of all these tall buildings is like out of a disaster movie. There's never been a hurricane this strong hit a city of a million+ before.
The lack of info from places other than the resort section is troubling--and the info from the resort section is horrible. It will likely take weeks to understand what happened and account for everyone. Then you have the massive problem of debris removal. Acapulco is going to be dealing with this for years.
Video of the ground floor/land damage and debris gives me flashbacks of Hurricane Ike in Galveston in 2008. It was like a nuke went off
There’s a plethora of reasons the models failed miserably on this storm. You can’t rule out the conditions changed so drastically in that short amount of time which led to the RI… The data was incredibly limited. Basically just satellite which was in a difficult position. There was only one Hurricane Hunter flight and wind shear was overlooked. Also, there’s no radar, no coastal radar, and no upper-air weather stations in the area. There’s barely any surface observations down there. All of that data goes into weather models. Without data the models are useless. It’s wild in this day and age that theres’sa city with a million plus people and severely lacks basic meteorology tools.
I don’t know about Mexican building codes but it wouldn’t surprise me if corners were cut in construction. Mexico has problems With corruption and resort construction worldwide is prone to it. That said it is hard to construct a building to resist 165 MPH winds and the even the most up to date codes have a hard time dealing with that. Good thing was there were no immediate deaths caused by the hurricane but the damage looks severe with water infrastructure heavily damaged. Acapulco sounds like it’s cut off from the rest of Mexico right now so rescue and recovery is hard to bring in.
That stuff cost money and I’m guessing that Mexican authorities decided to focus on spending on other things rather than in weather prediction and disaster prevention. It’s also possible they given that pacific hurricanes are less common than Atlantic ones a lot of Mexico’s weather infrastructure is in the East coast. I can completely believe that a city of one million doesn’t have that type of equipment. Compared to much of the World Mexico is better off. There are many countries like the Philippines, Honduras, etc.. with large populations but poorer than Mexico.
