Looters took food and water from shops in Mexico's Los Cabos beach resorts today after Hurricane Odile blew away wooden homes, flooded streets and damaged hotels housing thousands of tourists.
Dozens of people, including children, ransacked at least five small convenience stores, making off with batteries and alcoholic drinks, before troops arrived to stop the looting in poorer neighbourhoods of Baja California peninsula.
"I'm taking water for the children and food for the baby. You never know what can happen tomorrow," Osvaldo Lopez, 41, said as he left a store.
Odile tore down trees, power lines and tin roofs as it crashed ashore late yesterday as a category three hurricane in the five-scale Saffir-Simpson scale, packing winds of 205-kilometre per hour.
The hurricane weakened to category two strength as it moved up the peninsula, but it was still launching winds of 155 kilometres per hour, according to the US National Hurricane Centre.
Scores of homes were wrecked in an impoverished district while electricity poles collapsed onto cars, but no victims were immediately reported.
Soledad Mayo, 52, said she sent four of her children to a neighbour's sturdier home while she stayed in her wooden house with her husband even as Odile destroyed its roof and walls.
"We spent the night standing there, waiting to see what would be left of our house. But look, it took everything," said the shopkeeper as a microwave and other household objects lay on the rubble.
Odile caused streams to overflow. Flood waters carried away cars and refrigerators.
The storm did not spare luxury hotels, breaking windows, flooding rooms and sending palm trees into one swimming pool. In one hotel, workers tried to stop the water with towels.
"I'm disappointed about my vacation, but above all my heart aches for the people from here who lost everything," said Tifani Brown, a 34-year-old American tourist who had arrived yesterday from California.
"It's one thing to see hurricanes on TV. It's another to live them," she said.
