Hurricane Dean has weakened to a Category 3 storm after hitting Mexico's Caribbean coast today, the US National Hurricane Center said. Dean had been a Category 5 cyclone, the strongest possible.
Hurricane Dean made landfall on Mexico's Caribbean coast today as winds and heavy rain battered beach resorts where thousands of tourists huddled in shelters.
Seas churned as the eye of the storm, which has already killed 11 people on its rampage through the Caribbean, smashed into the shore near the cruise ship port of Costa Maya, close to the border with Belize.
A woman sits amid the rubble of her house left by the strong winds of Hurricane Dean in Portland Cottage, Jamaica, yesterday.
Dean was still packing sustained winds of 165 miles per hour (268 kph), with gust of up to 200 mph when it came ashore, but weakened as it passed over the Yucatan Peninsula.
Tourists squeezed into a hotel serving as a shelter for 400 people in the resort of Playa del Carmen, where winds violently shook palm trees. As many as 12 people were sharing some rooms.
Dean was due to cross the Yucatan and come out in the Gulf of Mexico before hitting land again in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
Store windows were boarded up along the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, a strip of beach resorts with bright white sands that is yet to fully recover from the devastation of Hurricane Wilma in 2005.
Troops and police patrolled the area to enforce a curfew declared by the state government.
Mexico's state oil company was closed, and it evacuated all of its 407 oil and gas wells in the Campeche Sound, meaning lost production of 2.65 million barrels of crude per day.
Heavy rain drenched Belize, a former British colony that is home to some 250,000 people. "This is one of the most dangerous and biggest hurricanes we have had so far," said Robert Leslie, cabinet secretary of the Belizean government.
Dean swept across Jamaica at the weekend with roaring winds and pelting rain. Roads were blocked by fallen trees and power poles and police said two people were killed.
Category 5 hurricanes - the strongest possible - are rare but there were four in 2005, including Katrina, which devastated New Orleans.
The higher number of powerful storms in recent years has reinforced research that suggests global warming may increase the strength of tropical cyclones.