Eye of Powerful Hurricane Reaches Mexico’s Coast

http://www.nytimes.com/ap
Hurricane Dean slammed into the Caribbean coast of Mexico on Tuesday as a roaring Category 5 hurrycane, the most intense Atlantic storm to make landfall in two decades. It lashed remote Mayan villages as it raced across the Yucatan Peninsula to the heart of Mexico's oil industry.
Dean's path was a stroke of luck for Mexico: After killing 13 people in the Caribbean, it made landfall along a sparsely populated coastline, well to the south of the major resorts where 50,000 tourists had been evacuated.
It weakened to a Category 1 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, but was expected to grow back into a powerful hurricane as it draws fuel from the warm waters of the lower Gulf of Mexico, where more than 100 offshore oil platforms were evacuated ahead of the storm.
It had an expected storm surge of 12 to 18 feet above normal tides and dumped huge amounts of rain on low-lying areas where thousands of Mayan Indians live in stick huts in isolated communities.
Soldiers evacuated more than 250 small communities.
Some of the storm's strongest winds raked the state capital of Chetumal, where residents were ordered to stay home until 10 a.m. Tuesday after a harrowing night with windows shattering and heavy water tanks flying off of rooftops. Sirens wailed constantly as the storm battered the city for hours, hurling billboards down streets. All electricity was down.
Just across the border in Belize, trees fell and debris flew through the air. The government evacuated Caye Caulker and Ambergris Caye -- both popular with American tourists -- and ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew from Belize City north to the Mexican border.
In the Belizean town of Corozal, about nine miles south of Chetumal, Dean flipped over a residential trailer, detached roofs from houses, ripped plywood off windows and spread floodwaters as high as 3 feet. No deaths or major injuries were reported there or in Belize City, where thousands evacuated to higher ground.
Dean's path takes it directly through the Cantarell oil field, Mexico's most productive, with dozens of oil rigs and three major ports. All were shut down just ahead of the storm, resulting in a production loss of 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day.

MY PERSONAL REACTION:
I think that this tipe of things could happen more frecuently if the human being don't realize that the embiroment is very important in the world.
The factories should take measures about the ambiental polution and realize that this is a very big problem.