Category 4 Hurricane Lidia Unleashes Havoc on Beloved Mexican Resort Town
As a “extremely dangerous” Category 4 storm with winds of 140 mph (220 kph), Hurricane Lidia hit land Tuesday evening near Puerto Vallarta, a resort on Mexico’s Pacific coast. It then moved inland as a strong hurricane.
The hurricane center in the United States said that Lidia’s eye seemed to have hit land near Las Penitas in the western state of Jalisco. The place is a peninsula with few people living on it.
The hurricane then moved south of Puerto Vallarta to a place in the middle of nowhere, about 30 miles (50 km) east of the resort and 90 miles (150 km) west of Guadalajara, the city of Jalisco State.
Lidia was still a strong storm late Tuesday, even though it had moved over land. Its winds were 105 mph (165 kph). States like Jalisco and Nayarit said that trees and power lines had been downed, and some roads in the area had been covered by landslides.
Forecasters said Lidia could still be a Category 1 storm when it passed by Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, around midnight. It was moving east-northeast at about 17 mph (28 kph).
An hour and a half after Lidia hit land, Jalisco Gov. Enrique Alfaro said on the platform X that the storm had caused “extraordinary rain and high surf” in some places, but that there had been no reports of injuries or deaths yet.
He said that 23 shelters were open in the state. A few dozen people had gone to shelters in Puerto Vallarta, according to the city government.
Another Category 5 storm, storm Patricia, hit land in 2015 along the same stretch of coast between the resort of Puerto Vallarta and the main port of Manzanillo.
The hurricane center warned of possible flash floods because Lidia was going to bring a lot of rain to the area.
The center expects rainfall totals of 4 to 8 inches, with localized totals of 12 inches possible in some places in the state of Nayarit, southern portions of the state of Sinaloa, and coastal areas of Jalisco.
Classes were stopped in areas near the coast by the government. The effect is supposed to happen one day after Tropical Storm Max hit the southern Pacific coast from hundreds of miles away and then went away. Part of a coastal highway in the southern state of Guerrero washed away by Max’s rain.
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