Called the strongest storm in history to make landfall along the eastern Pacific Coast, Hurricane Otis ripped across Mexico’s southern Pacific coast as a powerful Category 5 storm early Wednesday, tearing through buildings in the resort city of Acapulco, sending sheets of earth down steep mountainsides and causing massive flooding.

Acapulco’s Diamond Zone, an oceanfront area replete with hotels, restaurants and other tourist attractions, appeared to be mostly underwater in television footage shared online Wednesday afternoon, with boulevards and bridges completely hidden by an enormous lake of brown water.

By midafternoon, Otis had weakened to a tropical storm, yet many on the coast were left reeling. The full extent of the damage was not known, but the main highway into Acapulco was impassable and large swaths of the southwestern state of Guerrero were without power or cellphone service.

Hurricane Otis arrived as a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane Wednesday, bringing dangerous winds and heavy rain to Acapulco and surrounding towns, stirring memories of a 1997 storm that killed dozens of people. The storm was the second in a week in Mexico after Hurricane Norma battered Los Cabos and the Baja Peninsula to the north over the weekend.

Now a Category 2 storm, the hurricane was expected to continue to weaken quickly in Guerrero state’s steep mountains, but the 13-25 cm of rain forecast, with as much as 38 cm possible in some areas, raised the threat of landslides and floods.

The centre of Otis was expected to move farther inland over southern Mexico through Wednesday night.

Otis had strengthened rapidly, going from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in 12 hours Tuesday.

Acapulco is a city of nearly 1 million people at the foot of steep mountains. Luxury homes and slums alike cover the city’s hillsides with views of the glistening Pacific. Once drawing Hollywood stars for its nightlife, sport fishing and cliff diving shows, Acapulco has in more recent years fallen victim to competing organized crime groups that have sunk the city into violence, driving many international tourists to the Caribbean waters of Cancun and the Riviera Maya or beaches farther down the Pacific coast in Oaxaca.

Videos from hotel guests in Acapulco posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, as the storm came ashore showed blinding horizontal rain and howling winds.

In one, white towels danced high above a hotel’s cavernous courtyard like sheets of paper and bed mattresses trembled on balconies, apparently an effort to blunt the storm’s winds. Another showed wind and rain howling unimpeded down hotel hallways. While in still another, a family huddled inside a hotel room shower to escape breaking windows and fierce wind.

Hurricane Tammy

Meanwhile, the Atlantic, Hurricane Tammy continued moving northeastward over open water with winds of 140 kph after sweeping through the Lesser Antilles over the weekend. Tammy was located about 900 km south-southeast of Bermuda and was expected to become a powerful extratropical cyclone by Thursday, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.