Considerable damage. Following the passage of Hurricane Otis, categorized force 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, the hotels, shops and restaurants of the main tourist avenue of the port of Acapulco, Mexico, were deserted.
“It’s total chaos. It’s indescribable. I had never seen that in my life, so much destruction, without water, without electricity. The beach is a public dump,” notes José David Mendoza, a 63-year-old restaurateur.
His beachside business was flooded, chairs and tables were overturned.
Human losses and economic disaster
While the human toll remains, for the moment, at least 27 dead and four people missing, looting has taken place in damaged and abandoned supermarkets. Residents are still without electricity.
The disaster is also economic for Acapulco, the hurricane having struck a few weeks before the December holidays, which mark the start of the high tourist season.
The relief efforts, still insufficient in number to help the inhabitants of a city of nearly a million inhabitants, will also have to erase the traces of the damage from the hurricane which formed in just a few hours in the Pacific before to make landfall with winds of more than 250 km/h.
Smashed buildings, sidewalks strewn with debris, uprooted trees: discover the chaotic images of the day after in the video just above.