PUERTO VALLARTA SPARED THE WORST OF LIDIA

Hurricane Lidia dissipated Wednesday after hitting land as a Category 4 hurricane near the resort of Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, where one person was killed by a falling tree and two others injured. The hurricane knocked over trees and blew roofs off houses with winds as high as 220 kph before moving inland.

Lidia made landfall on a sparsely populated peninsula and then moved inland south of Puerto Vallarta, still with winds of 165 kph and remained a powerful hurricane even after moving over land, with some highways briefly blocked in the region..

The US National Hurricane Center said that Lidia’s winds were down to 56 kph as it dissipated about 235 km north-northeast of the city of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city and the capital of the western state of Jalisco.

Victor Hugo Romo, the head of the Jalisco state civil defense office, said several homes around the landfall area had their roofs blown off, and the Puerto Vallarta city government said about a dozen trees had been knocked down there.

Trees were also downed in the neighboring state of Nayarit.

The state had 23 shelters open, he said. The Puerto Vallarta city government said a few dozen people had gone to shelters there.

Local authorities cancelled classes in communities around the coast. The expected impact came one day after Tropical Storm Max hit the southern Pacific coast, hundreds of miles away, and then dissipated. Rains from Max washed out part of a coastal highway in the southern state of Guerrero.

In 2015, Hurricane Patricia, a Category 5 hurricane, also made landfall on the same sparsely populated stretch of coastline between the resort of Puerto Vallarta and the major port of Manzanillo.