Acapulco suffered a devastating blow: “All predictions failed,” says a scientist, explaining why Hurricane Otis unleashed so much fury on the state of Guerrero, Mexico?

Acapulco is devastated. What happened in Mexico with the surprising and powerful passage of Otis, a meteorological phenomenon that in a short time turned from a tropical storm into a category 5 hurricane, the most dangerous, to unleash its fury in the entire state of Guerrero.

The images of destroyed hotels and businesses, wrecked boats, scattered glass, trees and fallen power poles are breathtaking on social networks and television.

To worsen the situation, several roads in Guerrero collapsed, as did the telephone system. Faced with the devastating images, the question arose again: What happened in Acapulco, in the entire state?

Amid the destruction that began to become known, one of the viral images was the traffic jam, due to mud, of the vehicle in which President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was trying to reach Acapulco.

“Everything changed in 20 minutes”

Otis’s arrival was at dawn. On Wednesday, October 25, around 1 a.m., the wind was no longer normal. The alarms about the destruction caused came from the media and networks from the early hours of the morning.

On Thursday afternoon the 26th, it was announced that authorities in Guerrero had declared a state of emergency following the passage of Hurricane Otis.

The bay, so famous in Acapulco, is a graveyard of yachts. “There was nothing left,” one man complained in a video on Instagram.

“I’m still looking for my boat here, I can’t find it,” he said.

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Photographer David Guzmán told the EFE agency that around half past one in the morning “the wind started to blow more” and that the warnings came through WhatsApp without taking into account what was to come.

Wind speeds of 64 kilometers per hour grew to 270 kilometers per hour.

Rosa Icela Rodríguez, Minister of Security

“Everything changed in twenty minutes. The wind began to blow, through the window we began to see bulldozers (containers, water tanks), flying bulkheads, the sounds were terrible, it was frightening,” he recalls.

With one sentence, Guzmán tries to illustrate what he experienced when he saw his living room and refrigerator turned upside down: “It’s like they shook us.”

He said he has lived in Acapulco for 33 years “and we have never seen anything as devastating as this hurricane.”

The blight of Hurricane Otis caused damage to 83,801 businesses in Guerrero, so businesspeople expect a slow recovery of the state’s service sector.

Joaquín López Dóriga, journalist

All predictions have failed, says UNAM expert

In addition to the incalculable material losses, it was learned on Thursday morning through the Minister of Security and Civil Protection, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, that “Otis” left 27 dead and 4 missing.

Benjamín Martínez López, a researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Change of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), explained in an interview with journalist Joaquín López Dóriga what happened to “Otis” in Acapulco.

From a scientific point of view, it is known that “Otis” made landfall at approximately 00:30 (12:30). There are estimates that experts make three days in advance and the forecast indicates how strong it could be, but that wasn’t the case with this one, he said.

He said this when asked about the United States National Hurricane Center’s estimate, which was released on October 24 around 11 p.m. An hour and a half later the chaos began.

“It was quite a complex hurricane, it went from a tropical storm to a hurricane in a few hours. “All predictions failed, not only the Mexicans but also the Americans.”

What actually happened was a very strong intensification due to a large amount of energy building up in something known as the Mexican Tropical Pool.

As the storm continued its path and the interaction with those very warm waters took place It went from storm to hurricane 1,2,3,4,5 in record time, the expert explained.

Hurricane Otis reaches Category 5 and is expected to make landfall on the southern coast of Mexico

The historic record of intensification in Mexico, which lasted 24 hours, was broken by Hurricane Patricia in 2015.

Rosa Icela Rodríguez, Minister of Security

The energy that a hurricane needs to form is precisely thermal energy and it is contained in the first meters of the oceans.

Regarding climate change, “we have seen heat waves in the oceans increasing and especially in June and July 2023, all records held since 1950 were broken.”

To understand what happened to a disturbance that was created and began to spread, it reached an incredible reservoir of energy and within a few hours it turned from a tropical storm into a hurricane.

So “it caught everyone off guard, because in order to make a good prediction one would have to have very accurate knowledge of the boundary conditions, of the sea, and that knowledge is unfortunately far from available.” (JO)