Hurricane Jimena roared toward
Hurricane Jimena roared toward Baja California on Tuesday as an extremely dangerous Category Five storm, Mexican officials said as they planned emergency evacuations for 20,000 families. Jimena was packing winds of up to 250 kilometers (155 miles) per hour but was expected to weaken to a Category Four hurricane before making landfall in Baja California late Tuesday or on Wednesday, the National Weather Service said. The center of the hurricane was 345 km (215 miles) south of Cabo San Lucas as of 0600 GMT Tuesday, according to the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC), a US government agency that tracks and predicts storms.
US forecasters put Jimena at a Category Four on the one-to-five Saffir-Simpson scale, but noted that the storm was “very near the threshold of Category Five status.” A hurricane warning remained in effect for the southern portion the Baja California peninsula, from Bahia Magdalena southward on the west coast, and from San Evaristo southward on the east coast, including popular tourist spot Cabo San Lucas. A hurricane watch was active elsewhere on the peninsula. “Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” the NHC warned, urging interests throughout the peninsula and in the western Mexican mainland to monitor the hurricane’s progress.
With gusty winds and rains already hitting La Paz, the capital of the peninsula’s southern Baja California Sur state, residents were hastily boarding up windows and stockpiling goods as the most powerful hurricane of the year so far approached. More than a thousand foreign tourists fled Los Cabos, a resort town on the southern tip of Baja California, which was placed on high alert as emergency officials prepared contingency plans. The local hotel association estimated that some 7,000 tourists would be evacuated before the storm was expected to make landfall on the resort-filled peninsula, which spears south from the US state of California into the Pacific.
