Hurricane pushes into Mexico gulf

Hurricane Dean has moved offshore after lashing Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and Belize, toppling trees and houses and bringing torrential rain.

Major tourist resorts were not directly hit, as the storm made landfall about 170 miles (270km) south of Cancun. There are no reports of deaths so far.

Dean was a Category Five hurricane, the highest level, when it made landfall, but later weakened to Category One.

It should strengthen as it crosses the Gulf of Mexico to make landfall again. At 2100 GMT, Dean was moving north-west across the Bay of Campeche with winds of 80mph (130km/h).

Mexico's state oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, has evacuated workers and shut down all offshore oil and gas facilities in the oil-rich gulf.

Dean is expected to hit Mexico again at about 1300 (1800 GMT) on Wednesday between Veracruz and Tampico.

'On guard'

US National Hurricane Center (UHC) spokesman Jamie Rhome warned residents not to let their guard down before Dean's return.

"We often see that when a storm weakens, people let down their guard completely. You shouldn't do that," he told Associated Press news agency.

The eye of the storm came ashore over the Yucatan Peninsula at 0330 (0830 GMT) in a sparsely populated area near the town of Majahual, where hundreds of homes were destroyed.

It lashed low-lying communities and ancient Mayan ruins, but officials from Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute told the Associated Press news agency that none of the archaeological sites in Quintana Roo and Yucatan were damaged.

The BBC's Heather Alexander in the resort of Cancun further north says people there are breathing a sigh of relief, but the worst-affected areas are poor and remote and the extent of the damage is not yet clear.

Andrea Montalvo, of the US-based Spanish-language Telemundo television network, said the storm was wreaking havoc in the town of Chetumal, to the east of Majahual. "Inside the hotel it is really bad, every 10 or 15 minutes you can hear windows shattering and people are coming out of their rooms in panic," she said.

"If this is how it is here in this hotel, which is pretty solid, I don't want to think about how it is there." City officials said there were power cuts as the wind knocked over trees and sent debris flying through the air.

Further south, most of Belize was without power. Officials in Belize City closed hospitals and urged people to head inland, saying the town's shelters were not strong enough.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, attending a trade summit in Canada, said he would return home on Tuesday and visit affected areas.

US President George W Bush offered aid to help hurricane victims, saying: "We stand ready to help".

"The American people care a lot about the human condition in our neighbourhood, and when we see human suffering we want to do what we can," he said.

Fleeing the storm

The hurricane has already claimed at least 11 lives in the eastern Caribbean. About two-thirds of the tourists in Cancun and other resorts left the area before Dean's arrival.

Dean is expected to be less damaging than the Category Five Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which lingered over the Yucatan for a day, killing 10 people and wrecking large areas of Cancun.

It is the third strongest Atlantic hurricane to make landfall since records began in the 1850s.

BBC