LA PAZ, Mexico — Hurricane Newton packing 90-mile (145-kilometer) per hour winds made landfall near the Los Cabos resort area of Mexico’s west coast on Tuesday where thousands of tourists and locals are hunkered down, US forecasters said.
“Hurricane winds are spreading over southern Baja California,” the US National Hurricane center said in a bulletin that placed the storm five miles (eight kilometers) southeast of the town of Cabo San Lucas.
Some 15,000 tourists are in the region, mostly around the popular resort of Los Cabos, according to the region’s tourism secretary, Genaro Ruiz Hernandez, who announced that all flights were cancelled in the state late Monday.
Authorities have also closed ports to small boats in Baja and other parts of the Pacific coast, with a storm surge expected to hit low-lying coastal areas.
Los Cabos, famed for its beaches and nightlife, was pummeled in September 2014 by Hurricane Odile which left six people dead and caused $1 billion in damage
The eye of Hurricane Newton is forecast to pass over Cabo San Lucas, then move over the southern portion of the Baja California peninsula before moving into northwestern Mexico on Wednesday morning.
The US center said the storm should still be at hurricane strength when it makes landfall a second time after crossing over the Gulf of California, which lies between the peninsula and the Mexican mainland.
The government of the state of Baja California Sur has opened shelters with room for 16,000 people after the tropical storm was reclassified as a hurricane, with the region braced for torrential rains. The storm is due to produce up to 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain in several Pacific coast states, which could trigger life-threatening flash floods and mudslides, the US hurricane center said.
A “dangerous” storm surge was expected to cause significant coastal flooding, it added.
Newton threatened to cause more mudslides and flooding in eight states along the Pacific coast, Mexican authorities said, adding that thousands of shelters were readied.
The weather system caused damage in the country’s south over the weekend before it became a tropical storm, with heavy rain blamed for three deaths in the southern state of Chiapas.
Floods and landslides damaged or affected some 70 homes and schools and trapped around 200 people in Acapulco, the resort in the southwestern state of Guerrero.
Torrential rain that began Saturday morning flooded some 1,400 homes and caused more than 30 landslides on highways in Guerrero, civil protection authorities said.
Heavy rainfall trapped around 200 people in a housing complex, prompting air evacuations by police, marines and the army.
In the United States, Florida was spared the worst when Hurricane Hermine — later downgraded to a tropical storm — crashed ashore before moving out to sea.
The hurricane center warned that the post-tropical cyclone would cause a storm surge and tide that could flood normally dry areas in the northeastern United States.
Hermine, located some 150 miles southeast of the eastern tip of New York’s Long Island, had sustained winds of 70 miles per hour but was expected to weaken late Tuesday.
Tropical storm warnings were issued in Long Island and parts of the northeastern states of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Hermine killed two people after striking Florida on Friday before weakening to tropical storm status as it moved north off the US East Coast.
Florida’s first hurricane landfall since 2005 caused street flooding and power outages.
