Dean wallops a prepared Yucatan

FELIPE CARRILLO PUERTO, Mexico -- Nature, good luck, and good planning all combined yesterday to deliver what the people of the Yucatan Peninsula called a miracle.

Hurricane Dean, packing winds of 165 miles per hour, was one of the most powerful Atlantic storms ever to make landfall when it hit near this town of 20,000 people early yesterday. And it remained ferocious as it crossed the peninsula, inflicting widespread destruction.

But there appeared to be few injuries. As of late yesterday, no deaths had been reported, despite winds that seriously damaged more than one-third of the buildings in some seaside communities.

"They've made an effort here to spread the idea of being prepared," said Abel Posadas, part of a team of Red Cross workers who drove 1,000 miles from Mexico City to Felipe Carrillo Puerto in the days before the hurricane struck. "Everyone just stays calm and gets ready."

Some 1,500 families saw their homes destroyed or seriously damaged in Quintana Roo state, which includes Felipe Carrillo Puerto and resorts such as Cancun, officials said.

Many of the homeless are the state's poorest residents, including hundreds of Mayan Indians.

Humberto Sosa, a 35-year-old Mayan-speaking resident of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, was one of those who lost his home. Like many in the region, his home was a precarious structure of cardboard and tin sheets. He escaped injury by seeking shelter in a city refuge.

"When those tin sheets start flying, they're really dangerous because they're sharp," he said. "You have to get away."

In years past, Sosa and other poor residents of the region were more likely to try to ride out the storm. There were reports of Mayan communities where people resisted evacuation this time, too, and officials said it would take days to learn the fate of people in the most isolated communities.

But the memory of 2005's Hurricane Wilma, which brought widespread destruction to Cancun, has led officials to redouble their education efforts.

"We've spent days talking to our Mayan brothers, telling them to come to the shelters in the city," explained Fernando Montalvo Rodriguez, a government official in the region.

Similar preparations took hold of Cancun, Tulum, and other cities and towns catering to the tourist trade.

In Tulum, 60 miles to the north of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, government officials evacuated a 10-mile stretch of beach outside the city, where hotels and bungalows face pristine white sands and the turquoise Caribbean.

A third of the buildings on the beach were seriously damaged by Dean, officials said. But not a single resident or tourist was killed.

Tulum emergency coordinator Lucio Salvador Arguea credited the government's year-round education efforts, which include PowerPoint presentations on storm surges made at local schools.

"People here know that when the army and the municipal government comes and tells them to leave, they have to go," Arguea said.

When a reporter drove the beachside road on Monday, some 18 hours before the storm, he found nearly all of the structures there padlocked and empty.

Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo state and home to 147,000 people, was the city hardest hit by the storm. Extensive flooding hit the city center. But there were, as of late yesterday, no reports of deaths there, either.

US forecasters said Hurricane Dean was the third-most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall since the mid-19th century, when recording keeping began.

The only storms that were stronger when they hit land were a 1935 Labor Day hurricane that hit the Florida Keys and Hurricane Gilbert, which hit Cancun in 1988.

Later yesterday, the storm worked its way west over the peninsula, weakening to a Category 2 storm as it passed through the state of Campeche and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it could threaten platforms that produce much of Mexico's oil. Dean was expected to regain some strength in the Gulf before hitting the Mexican coast once more today between Tampico and Veracruz.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón cut short his summit in Canada with President Bush and Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper to travel to the area and survey the damage late yesterday.

"I am worried, very worried, that the hurricane passed over some of our poorest Mayan communities in the Yucatan." Calderón said before leaving Canada.

Juan Bautista Ucan, 47, said several ramshackle homes in his neighborhood in Felipe Carrillo Puerto were destroyed, including his own. "We tied everything up, but it didn't help," he said, describing the fierce winds that knocked down his wooden house. "The only thing left is the skeleton."