Grace Weakens To Tropical Storm After Lashing Mexican Caribbean

Canc�n, Mexico, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Aug, 2021 ) :Hurricane Grace grounded flights and forced tourists to spend the night in shelters on Mexico's Caribbean coastline before weakening to a tropical storm on Thursday as it moved inland.

Grace made landfall before dawn as a Category One hurricane -- the lowest on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale -- on the Yucatan Peninsula near the town of Tulum, famed for its Mayan temples.

It lost strength as it churned across the peninsula and was clocking maximum sustained winds of 95 kilometers (60 miles) per hour at 1800 GMT, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami said.

On Wednesday, as the hurricane approached Mexico, more than 100 flights to or from the major resort of Cancun were cancelled.

In total, more than 6,000 tourists and residents were evacuated to storm shelters across the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, according to local authorities.

The storm passed the Riviera Maya coastline without any loss of life, said Quintana Roo governor Carlos Joaquin.

Cancun airport resumed operations on Thursday but ports remained closed, Joaquin said on Twitter.

Workers were seen clearing up fallen branches and other debris in Tulum but the town -- like other tourist resorts along the Caribbean coast -- escaped major damage.

"The scare is over and luckily everything turned out OK," said Sandra Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Argentinian tourist visiting Cancun.

Rodriguez admitted she had been worried because she was not used to such storms.

"I thought the hurricane was going to drown us," she said jokingly.

str-sem-dr/sw