Hurricane Dean slammed into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on Tuesday, pummelling the area with vicious winds and heavy rainfall as it bore down on the heart of Mexico's oil industry.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon said no deaths were immediately reported in the country, after Dean killed 13 people in the Caribbean.
Dean was a Category 5 storm -- the highest level on the scale -- when it made landfall, but later weakened to a Category 1 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 137 km/h.
"It wasn't minutes of terror. It was hours," Montreal-native Catharine Morales, who has lived in Majahual for a year, told The Associated Press. "The walls felt like they were going to explode."
Dean was expected to grow back into a powerful hurricane, however, as it moves northwest -- drawing fuel from the warm waters of the lower Gulf of Mexico -- and over the Bay of Campeche, which houses more than 100 oil platforms and three major oil exporting ports.
"We often see that when a storm weakens, people let down their guard completely. You shouldn't do that,'' hurricane specialist Jamie Rhome told The Associated Press. "This storm probably won't become a Category 5 again, but it will still be powerful."
Bernie Rayno, a senior meteorologist with Accuweather, said Dean could make landfall again Wednesday at Tecolutla, a coastal river town between Veracruz and Tampico, as a Category 2 storm bringing with it some very heavy rain.
"As it continues to move inland we're going to have problems with rain and because of the mountainous terrain and the amount of rain -- we're going to see over 200 to 300 millimetres of rain along the eye of this hurricane -- we're going to see some flooding certainly, and there will be the danger of mudslides," Rayno told Â鶹´«Ã½net Tuesday afternoon from State College, Pennsylvania.
The Tampico area is an oil-industry hub, with derricks and pipelines dotting the land.
The storm first made landfall in a sparsely populated coastline that had mostly been evacuated and avoided most of the major tourist resorts.
Packing sustained winds near 270 km/h and gusts reaching 322 km/h -- faster than the takeoff speed of many passenger jets -- the storm dumped rain on the low-lying Yucatan Peninsula, where thousands of Mayan Indians live in stick huts in remote communities.
About 50,000 tourists were safely evacuated from resorts on the Yucatan peninsula.
But the driving rain, poor communications and impassable roads made it difficult to determine how hard isolated communities were hit in the area where Dean made landfall.
Troops evacuated more than 250 small communities, and 8,000 people took refuge in 500 shelters, said Jorge Acevedo, a Quintana Roo state spokesman. He told AP that others turned away soldiers with machetes and refused to leave, but some of them changed their minds when the winds and rain intensified.
At 11 p.m. ET, Dean had winds of 130 km/h with higher gusts, and was centered about 345 kilometres east-northeast of Veracruz, Mexico. It was moving west-northwest at 30 km/h, the National Hurricane Center said.
Dean intensified to a violent Category 5 storm Monday night, as high winds forced thousands of tourists to evacuate the coasts of Mexico and Belize.
It was the first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall since hurricane Andrew in 1992 in South Florida. Category 5 hurricanes -- the largest and most destructive storms possible -- have winds of more than 249 km/h.
Dean bore down on the Cayman Islands late Sunday after battering Jamaica, but the wealthy British protectorate said Monday it had been spared the brunt of the storm.
Dean's eye passed some 160 kilometres south of the Caymans, and the islands were spared hurricane-force winds.
Canada has offered up to $2 million in aid for Caribbean countries damaged by the hurricane. Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier said his department has had no reports of Canadian casualties.
Dean is the first storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.
President Felipe Calderon cut short his trip to Canada where he was meeting with U.S. President George Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper so that he could travel Tuesday to the hardest-hit areas.
Bush, standing by his side at a summit in Montebello, offered U.S. aid.
"We stand ready to help," Bush said. "The American people care a lot about the human condition in our neighborhood, and when we see human suffering we want to do what we can."
With a report from CTV's Tom Walters and files from The Associated Press
