Readiness pays off as Hurricane Dean passes over Yucatán Peninsula

In Playa del Carmen, curfews and shelters helped residents weather the Category 5 storm.

from the August 22, 2007 edition

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Paul, the owner of an art shop on Playa del Carmen's chic 5th Street, expressed relief as he looked at his store. "Wilma was bad because it stayed [over the city] for three days," he said. "There are a few palm huts to repair, but the city's fine. The government was well prepared this time."

Hurricane Dean was the most intense Atlantic storm to make landfall in two decades. But it made landfall along a sparsely populated coastline, well to the south of the major resorts like Playa del Carmen and Cancún, where 50,000 tourists had been evacuated.

Tuesday, it weakened to a Category 1 storm, but was expected to grow back into a powerful hurricane as it headed over the lower Gulf of Mexico, where more than 100 offshore oil platforms were evacuated ahead of the storm.

When Dean first struck land near the cruise port of Majahual, it had sustained winds near 165 m.p.h. There were no immediate reports of deaths, injuries or major damage, Governor Gonzalez told Mexico's Televisa network, though officials had not been able to survey the area.

The eye passed directly over the state capital of Chetumal. In the largely Mayan town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, about 30 miles north of the eye's westward path, people stared from their porches at broken tree limbs and electrical cables crisscrossing streets flooded with ankle-deep water.

Dean's path takes it directly toward the Cantarell oil field and also veers toward Mexico's only nuclear plant, where a state official said 2,000 buses were brought in to evacuate personnel if necessary.

Dean was expected to hit the central Mexican coast as a major hurricane Wednesday afternoon, about 400 miles south of the Texas border.

Back in Playa del Carmen, hotel manager Oscar XIX expressed relief at the lack of damage and noted the changes in the area in the past decade. "When hurricane Gilbert hit in 1988, people weren't prepared, they didn't know it was coming," he said. "They lived in palm huts because this was a town of fishermen. Very few people live in those conditions these days.

"The relief was well coordinated this time. They were in constant comunication with us about the storm. They told us before the storm hit and that gave us plenty of time to secure our homes."

• Associated Press material was used in this report.

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