Hurricane Henriette thrashes Mexico's Los Cabos

By Frank Jack Daniel

LOS CABOS, Mexico (Reuters) - Hurricane Henriette lashed Mexico's Pacific beach and golf resort of Los Cabos on Tuesday with howling winds and horizontal rain after killing a foreign tourist on its approach.

Henriette had maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, making it a relatively weak Category 1 hurricane, as it hit Los Cabos on the Baja California peninsula's southern tip, but it still snapped young palm trees in two and ripped branches off others.

Tourists stayed indoors after a middle-aged foreign woman was killed walking on the beach on Monday as the storm's approach sent 13-feet (4-meter) waves crashing onto the shore.

"She was walking very close to the sea. The swell sucked her in and smashed her against some rocks," firefighter Juan Antonio Carbajal said.

Henriette killed six people over the weekend when as a tropical storm it dumped rain on the coast around the resort of Acapulco. Hundreds of people were still in storm shelters in the southwestern state of Guerrero after the storm cut off entire villages with flooding or mudslides.

Heavy rain fell from early Tuesday in normally sunny Los Cabos, popular with U.S. golfers and other tourists, and anxious residents hammered boarding over store windows.

Strong waves crashed against the walls of the resort's marinas, which harbor dozens of sleek yachts.

Los Cabos' airport was closed and tourists were advised to stay off the streets as coffee-colored water surged up to knee level.

"I didn't even bring a raincoat," said Rick Swartout, who spent all morning mopping up water from a marina-front hotel as the wind repeatedly blew in its plastic sliding veranda doors. "I heard there might be a tropical storm but we came anyway. I'll regret it if it gets much worse."

In the Caribbean, another hurricane, Felix, slammed into Nicaragua and Honduras as a potentially catastrophic Category 5 storm before weakening to Category 1 inland.

POOR FAMILIES

Hundreds of poor families, including many construction and hotel workers, were evacuated to schools from homes built from flimsy materials such as cardboard on and around normally dry riverbeds that cut through the hilly desert behind the resort.

Emergency worker Julio Gomez said some people had to be ordered from their houses when they refused to leave, but by mid-afternoon evacuations in slum areas were called off because of the driving wind and rain.

"We can't go on with the evacuations or it would endanger the people working with us," he said.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center warned of coastal surges of up to 3 feet and isolated downpours of up to 15 inches in mountainous areas. "These rains could produce life-threatening flash floods and mudslides," it said.