BoatBanter.com - Emily heading for Mexico

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8624371/

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas - Hurricane Emily gathered strength Tuesday in the
Gulf of Mexico, threatening south Texas and a second strike against Mexico
after ripping roofs off resort hotels and stranding thousands of tourists in
the Yucatan Peninsula.

Emily hit the Mayan Riviera on Monday as a fierce Category 4 storm with 135
mph winds, causing millions of dollars in damage. Hundreds of local
residents were left homeless, but no deaths or major injuries were reported.

The storm weakened during the rampage but once back out to sea it began to
strengthen again, developing sustained winds of nearly 90 mph. Forecasters
expected Emily, a Category 1 hurricane, to hit northeastern Mexico, possibly
as a major hurricane, as early as Tuesday night.

Southern Texas was also threatened, and the National Hurricane Center in
Miami posted hurricane warnings along both sides of the Mexico-Texas border.

At 8 a.m. EDT, the storm was centered about 235 miles east of La Pesca,
Mexico, and 265 miles southeast of Brownsville, Texas, moving west-northwest
at 15 mph. It had sustained winds of 90 mph and some strengthening was
expected.

From the Mexican port of Tampico 250 miles north to the southern Texas
coastline, residents boarded up windows and evacuated low-lying areas.
Mexico's state-run oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, evacuated
15,000 oil workers from rigs in the storm's path.

Leaving South San Padre Island
In Texas, many tourists on South Padre Island started packing up Monday,
although about 10,000 remained, officials said. A steady stream of RVs
headed north from the island resort after a local judge ordered vehicles in
danger of being blown over by high winds to leave county parks on the
island.

"Your luck can't be that good all of the time and we've been lucky," Cameron
County park Ranger Arnold Flores said Monday. "We haven't been hit like
Florida has."

Flores was trying to get the last of the die-hard campers to move their RVs
from a park on the edge of South Padre Island's beach.

"We started telling people they need to leave because we don't want to be
responsible for someone getting hurt or something they could have avoided,"
he said.

Meanwhile, Yucatan Peninsula residents waded through knee-deep flood waters
to assess damage. Many are poor and came to the Yucatan Peninsula for jobs.
They live in flimsy thatched huts just out of sight of the resorts.

Officials for the state of Quintana Roo estimated about 3,000 such huts were
damaged or destroyed.

Tourists who spent the night in makeshift shelters emerged to try to find
ways home. Many went to the Cancun airport, which reopened Monday after
closing Sunday afternoon as the storm approached.

Riding out the storm
About 60,000 tourists were evacuated from the resort towns of Cancun, Tulum,
Playa de Carmen and Cozumel, an island just south of Cancun known for its
diving.

"All night long, cold water was pouring in through the holes in the wall,"
said tourist Graham Brighton, of Leicester, England, one of about 1,000
people who spent the night on thin foam pads lined up on a gymnasium floor
in Cancun. "There were just far too many people crammed into one space."

Sitting in the roofless, rain-soaked lobby of the Copacabana Hotel near
Puerto Aventuras, Samuel Norrod, of Livingston, Tenn., waited to hear if his
travel agent could get flights home for him, his wife and his 13-year-old
granddaughter.They rode out the storm in the hotel's ballroom.

"We could hear the windows smashing out. The wind would get loud, and then
it would get soft again. And then, for about 25 minutes, it got real still,"
Norrod said, describing the calm eye of the hurricane.

The worst damage was in Puerto Aventuras, where the storm's eye came ashore
some 60 miles south of Cancun and in Tulum, a collection of thatched hut
hotels along a secluded strip of beach that is popular with backpackers.

Quintana Roo state officials reported little damage to the ancient pyramids
in Tulum or elsewhere, but a team of archaeologists was to inspect sites
throughout the state. Tulum's streets were deserted Monday and the village
was without electricity, according to officials reached by telephone.

But damage from the hurricane was evident everywhere on the eastern Yucatan
coast, famous for its white-sand beaches and turquoise waters.

Power was knocked out all along the coast. The wind snapped concrete utility
poles in two along a half-mile stretch of highway between Playa del Carmen
and Cancun to the north. Plate glass windows were shattered on the ground
floors of numerous businesses in Playa del Carmen, while residents waded
through knee-deep water flooding some streets.

Emily hit Mexico after sweeping across the Caribbean, causing flooding that
killed a family of four in Jamaica but sparing the Cayman Islands major
damage.

Emily was the strongest storm this early in the Atlantic season since
record-keeping began in 1860. That had many in the Yucatan worried they were
in for a rough hurricane season, which runs through October.

"We have a well-founded fear that three or four such storms could hit," said
Francisco Alor, Cancun's mayor