A day after Hurricane Otis roared ashore in Acapulco, unleashing massive rains, the resort city of nearly one million still remains almost entirely cut off with the death toll uncertain.
Otis slammed into Mexico on Wednesday morning as the strongest storm to land on the country’s west coast, descending the city into chaos, setting off looting and leaving destruction and power outages in its wake.
The images and accounts were of extensive devastation, toppled trees and power lines lying in brown floodwaters that in some areas extended for miles.
Many of the once sleek beachfront hotels in Acapulco looked like shattered hulks a day after the Category 5 storm blew out hundreds — and possibly thousands — of windows.
Otis went from a Category 1 to a Category 5 storm in only 12 hours — the fastest rate ever recorded in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.
The storm had lost strength by Wednesday afternoon and was downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved past the Guerrero state. But soon after a 4.4-magnitude earthquake shook a resort town just 120 miles north of Acapulco.