After battering the Caribbean, Hurricane Dean slammed into Mexico last Tuesday. The monster storm--the first Atlantic hurricane of the season--pummeled Mexico's Yucatįn Peninsula. Dean bent palm trees, swept roofs off houses and took down power lines.
Mexico's tourist resorts were spared when Dean made landfall in a sparsely populated area. But poor conditions made it difficult to determine the storm's impact on isolated Mayan communities.
Felipe Calderūn, Mexico's president, cut short a trip to Canada, where he was meeting with President George W. Bush and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. Calderūn told the other leaders that it was "too early to assess the scope" of the storm's damages.
One Mean Category 5 StormThe hurricane killed at least 20 people in the Caribbean and left millions of dollars' worth of damages, mostly in Jamaica. When it hit St. Lucia and Martinique, Dean was a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which measures a storm's strength based on wind speed. A Category 3 storm has maximum sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, was a Category 3 when it hit the U.S. Gulf Coast.
As Dean traveled across the warm waters of the Caribbean, it gained strength. It was a Category 4 when it bashed Jamaica. By the time Dean reached Mexico, it was a Category 5, with winds of more than 155 miles per hour.
On Wednesday, a weakened Dean pounded Mexico's oil platforms on the Bay of Campeche. Weather experts warned that Dean still packed a wallop. "When a storm weakens, people let down their guard," said Jamie Rhome, a hurricane specialist. "You shouldn't do that."