Hurricane Patricia, one of the strongest storms ever recorded, made landfall along Mexico’s Pacific coast last night. While initial forecasts called for “catastrophic damage”, the category 5 storm weakened considerably to the relief of everyone involved. Damage was much less than expected, and no deaths have been reported.
“Strong winds and a lot of water,” said Sofia Quintero to USA Today. “But like they said it would be? No.”
Yesterday, winds reached 200 miles per hour. The hurricane’s central pressure bottomed out at 879 millibars, breaking the previous record of 882 millibars. Sixteen hours after Hurricane Patricia ramped up to the Western Hemisphere’s most powerful storm on record, it was downgraded to a tropical depression. As it moves east into higher altitudes, it is expected to weaken even more, but the rains that come with it are expected to cause serious flooding in Texas.
The storm made landfall just after 6 p.m on Friday in Jalisco. At the time, winds had dropped from 200 miles an hour to 160, which, while considerably less than expected, still placed Hurricane Patricia as a category 5 storm.
Although Hurricane Patricia wasn’t nearly as violent as expected when it slammed into Mexico’s coastline, when it comes to hurricanes in the Pacific, it was unlike any other.
“While a number of typhoons in the western North Pacific have been stronger,” wrote Rick Jervis and David Agren at USA Today, “Patricia is by far the strongest hurricane in any basin where the term ‘hurricane’ applies to tropical cyclones – namely, the central and eastern North Pacific basins and the North Atlantic basin, which includes the North Atlantic Ocean itself plus the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.”
The Mexican government has called off all hurricane warnings.
