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Hurricane Otis Batters Acapulco, Rips Across Southern Pacific Coast Before Becoming Tropical Storm

Otis had strengthened rapidly, going from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in just 12 hours on Tuesday.

ACAPULCO, Guerrero — Hurricane Otis ripped across Mexico's southern Pacific coast as a powerful Category 5 storm early Wednesday, tearing through buildings in the resort city of Acapulco, sending sheets of earth down steep mountainsides and leaving large swaths of the southwestern state of Guerrero without power or cellphone service.

While little is known about possible deaths or the full extent of the damage — the main highway into Acapulco was impassable — experts are calling Otis the strongest storm in history to make landfall along the Eastern Pacific Coast.

By late Wednesday afternoon, Otis had weakened to below tropical depression strength and was dissipating over the mountains, yet many on the coast were left reeling.

Flor Campos had been trudging through mud for more than an hour along a highway outside Acapulco on Wednesday morning before she peeled off her shoes, worried she'd lose them in the muck.

The domestic worker from a small town in Guerrero was among dozens of families, women and children who clambered over tree trunks and other debris left by landslides in the mountainous terrain. It was a daunting escape, but people were desperate to get out.

"We had been waiting since 3 in the morning to get out, so we decided to walk. It was more dangerous to stay. There are trees knocked down, power lines down," Campos said.

On Tuesday, Otis took many by surprise when it rapidly strengthened from a tropical storm to a powerful Category 5 as it tore along the coast. Researchers tracking the storm told The Associated Press that the storm broke records for how quickly it intensified, at a time when climate change has exacerbated devastating weather events like this one.

"It's one thing to have a Category 5 hurricane make landfall somewhere when you're expecting it or expecting a strong hurricane, but to have it happen when you're not expecting anything to happen is truly a nightmare," said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

Acapulco, Tecpan and other towns along the Costa Grande in Guerrero were hit hard, said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He said conditions were so bad that communication with the area had been "completely lost."

By late Wednesday afternoon, Otis' winds had dropped to 35 mph (56 kph) as the storm dissipated over the mountains of southern Mexico. Remnants of the storm were still expected to dump heavy rains on the area through Thursday, however, with the possibility of flash flooding and, in mountainous areas, mudslides, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

Campos and others in Guerrero were shocked by the extent of the damage Otis had wrought during its brief visit.

"There are children back there, 2 or 3 years old, with no water, nothing," Campos said.

Photos and video shared by Mexican news outlets from Acapulco after dawn showed the walls of buildings ripped off, flooded hotel rooms with collapsed ceilings, and rubble and downed trees lining the streets.

Acapulco is a city of nearly 1 million people at the foot of steep mountains. Luxury homes and slums alike cover the city's hillsides with views of the glistening Pacific. Once drawing Hollywood stars for its nightlife, sport fishing and cliff diving shows, Acapulco has in more recent years fallen victim to competing organized crime groups that have sunk the city into violence, driving many international tourists to the Caribbean waters of Cancun and the Riviera Maya or beaches farther down the Pacific coast in the state of Oaxaca.

Between the internationally known resorts of Acapulco and Zihuatanejo are two dozen small towns and villages.

On the outskirts of Acapulco on Wednesday, highway workers looked on helplessly without the heavy machinery needed to clear debris from the roadway. They warned the road could give way at any time because of the rain-softened ground beneath. Bridges in some areas had collapsed, and trees leaned almost horizontally across the highway, not because they were uprooted, but because the earth they grew on had slid down the slope.

Damage to the local military airport made it hard for authorities to access the region, López Obrador said. He said high-ranking members of his government would travel to Guerrero to help.

A long convoy of trucks from the national electric company moved through the Guerrero state capital, Chilpancingo, toward Acapulco before dawn Wednesday. Officials in Guerrero said on Wednesday afternoon that they were working to restore phone service.

Otis is stronger than Hurricane Pauline, which hit Acapulco in 1997, López Obrador said. Pauline destroyed swaths of the city and killed more than 200 people. Hundreds of others were injured in flooding and mudslides. Otis' arrival came just days after Hurricane Norma struck the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California Peninsula to the north.

While many were caught by surprise, Acapulco still was able to open two dozen shelters in the hours before Otis made landfall.

Videos from hotel guests in Acapulco posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, as the storm came ashore showed blinding horizontal rain and howling winds.

In one, white towels danced high above a hotel's cavernous courtyard like sheets of paper and bed mattresses trembled on balconies, apparently put there to blunt the storm's winds. Another showed wind and rain howling unimpeded down hotel hallways. In still another, a family huddled inside a hotel room shower to escape breaking windows and fierce wind.

In the Atlantic, Hurricane Tammy moved northeast over open water with winds of 105 mph (165 kph) after sweeping through the Lesser Antilles over the weekend. Tammy was about 515 miles (825 kilometers) southeast of Bermuda, and was moving northeast at about 13 mph (20 kph). The storm was expected to become a powerful extratropical cyclone by Thursday, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

Acer Chromebook Plus 515

Hey, remember Chromebooks? Those ultra-cheap laptops that run a stripped-down operating system built on Google's Chrome web browser? You know, the one your kid had to use for Zoom school and all that "asynchronous learning" during the pandemic?

Well, Chromebooks are back, and they're better than ever. This month, Google rolled out a big upgrade called Chromebook Plus, an umbrella category for a new class of devices from various manufacturers (including Google itself). The big sell is speed: New Chromebook Plus laptops promise double the performance over "top selling Chromebooks from July 2022 to Dec 2022," thanks to faster processors, more memory, more storage, and even better video cameras—all while keeping starting prices at the $400 level.

My first encounter with a Chromebook Plus was this Acer 515 model, which is built around a 15.6-inch (nontouch) display. The 12th-generation 3.85-GHz Intel Core i3-1215U processor is indeed an impressive leap over Chromebooks from the previous generation, though the 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of flash storage on this entry-level configuration have been available on Chromebooks for years. Naturally, you can buy higher-end models with more of everything, though upgrading sort of defeats the purpose of buying a Chromebook. Connectivity options are par for the course, including two USB-C ports (with DisplayPort supported), one USB-A port, and an HDMI 1.4 output jack.

Photograph: Best Buy

The boost in performance is palpable from the get-go. If you've ever used a budget Chromebook, you've probably groaned at how ploddingly slow it is on menial tasks. Even this minimal configuration is vastly faster than anything that's come before—at least twice as fast as older (and more expensive) models I've tested and often three or four times faster. Battery life hasn't suffered, with a solid 8.5 hours of full-screen video playback time.

Meanwhile, new apps borrowed from Google's Pixel universe are included to give the device more oomph, including the Magic Eraser photo-editing feature, options for backup and sync to Google Drive, dynamic wallpapers, a snazzy video editor, and enhanced video camera controls.

All of that was going great until my second day of testing, when the Acer Chromebook Plus 515 up and died on me—completely. I closed the lid and plugged it in to charge. When I reopened the laptop later, nothing happened, and the system would no longer boot. Troubleshooting with Acer's engineering team failed to revive the computer and the company had to send a replacement unit. So far, so good with the new one.

Photograph: Best Buy

Teenager Charged With Reckless Use Of Fire

-Messenger photo by Kelby WingertOne of the apartment buildings at the Westridge Townhomes on the west side of Fort Dodge was destroyed early Sunday morning in a fire. On Wednesady, the Fort Dodge Police Department said a 13-year-old boy was arrested and charged with reckless use of fire in connection with the incident.

A teenage boy was arrested and charged on Wednesday in connection to a large fire that displaced eight families in the Westridge Townhomes apartment complex on Sunday morning, according to police.

However, one neighbor says the blaze could have been prevented had authorities heeded their warnings.

The Webster County Telecommunications Center received a call at 1:18 a.M. Sunday with a report that part of a home was on fire. The Messenger obtained the audio of the 911 call through a public records request. In the recording, an unidentified caller told the dispatcher that there was a "small fire" under the panel on the back side of her home at 332 Ave. M West.

The Fort Dodge Fire Department reported that when crews arrived at the scene, they found occupants escaping the building with heavy fire conditions on the rear of unit 332. A third alarm was called to bring additional Fire Department resources to the scene.

According to a release sent out by Fort Dodge Police Chief Dennis Quinn on Wednesday, the fire "appeared to be suspicious in nature" and investigators with the FDPD, the State Fire Marshal's Office and Fort Dodge Fire Department began gathering evidence and speaking with witnesses. That investigation led to a 13-year-old boy being arrested and charged with reckless use of fire, a serious misdemeanor, police reported.

-Messenger photo by Kelby WingertPolice tape blocks off the back side of one of the Westridge Townhomes buildings on Wednesday afternoon. A fire destroyed much of the building early Sunday morning, displacing eight families.

The teenager, who was not named in the release, has been transported to Central Iowa Detention in Eldora and his case has been referred to the Webster County Attorney's Office and Juvenile Court Services for further action.

Eden Estes, who lived in the building with her partner and three kids, was awakened Sunday morning by a pounding on her front door.

"I opened the door and there's nothing but smoke covering everything — just a blanket of smoke," she said.

Estes said her family was able to safely evacuate the building and they were able to take their dog with them as well. They weren't able to locate their cat until Monday afternoon — shaken and scared, but alive.

On Monday, Estes alleged that police already knew that a teenage boy in the building had deliberately set the fire, and said she was upset that they hadn't done anything up to that point.

-Messenger photo by Kelby WingertA blanket lays tossed over burned wall structures at the Westridge Townhomes on Wednesday. Eight families were displaced when their building caught fire early Sunday morning.

"We all could have died … People have lost everything. Everything," she said. "Treasures they can't get back, furniture, bedding, clothes."

Estes alleged that the teenager had been playing with fire all summer and that multiple neighbors had reported the incidents.

"All of us in that apartment complex had been complaining about him to police … All summer, cops come in and out and nothing has been done, no one has done anything with this boy," she said. "All of this could have been prevented."

Estes said that in August, she called the FDPD because the boy allegedly took a lighter and a can of Axe body spray and was "going after" her daughter and her daughter's friends with it. She also said that just a few hours before Sunday's fire, the police had been called on the same boy for allegedly playing with fire.

According to Quinn, the FDPD received a call for service on Aug. 28 for kids allegedly trying to start some grass on fire. The call came in to dispatch as a request to have an officer return a call to the reporting party. There were no juvenile names listed on the call for service and no report was taken on the incident.

-Messenger photo by Kelby WingertUpstairs bedrooms in one of the Westridge Townhome buildings show damage done by a fire that blazed through the apartment building early Sunday morning. According to the 911 call from that night, the caller said the fire was "underneath the panel on the back of [their] house" at 332 Ave. M West.

Upon request from The Messenger, Quinn searched the calls for service logs dating back to May for 332 Ave. M West and the other units in the same structure and was not able to locate anything related to fire. He also searched through the calls for service on Saturday evening and didn't find any call to the Avenue M West area involving fire in the hours prior to the Sunday morning fire.

The FDFD was fighting the fire to bring it under control until about 3 a.M. On Sunday and remained on scene to extinguish hot spots throughout the building until 7:30 a.M.

The apartment building contained eight units, five of which suffered serious fire, smoke and water damage. The rest sustained smoke and water damage. No injuries were reported.

The FDPD reported that eight families were displaced due to the fire. Estes said each family had children and estimated there were about two dozen people living in the building prior to the fire.

On Monday, Estes said that the property managers at the apartment complex were offering families the chance to move into any vacant units in the complex and the American Red Cross had given each family $800 prepaid cards to pay for hotel rooms. Despite that, she said, several of the families are virtually homeless.

"We went to Section Eight this morning," she said. "We have to pre-file. They don't have any money for deposit, so it's all on us. We don't get paid till the beginning of the month, with a lot of us, so we have nowhere to go. Once this money runs out for hotels, we are literally living out of cars, and a lot of them don't have cars."

Investigators are continuing to follow up on Sunday's fire, Quinn said. Anyone with information is encouraged to contact police immediately by calling the non-emergency number at 515-573-2323. Information can also be submitted anonymously through Crime Stoppers by calling 515-573-1444 or by texting "LEC" and the tip to 274-637.

911 call

Through a public records request, The Messenger obtained the audio of the 911 call from Sunday morning's fire. Here is an unofficial transcript of that call.

Dispatcher: Webster County 911, what's the location of your emergency?

Unidentified caller: Uh, 332 Avenue M West.

Dispatcher: Three-three-two? What's going on?

Unidentified caller: There's a fire underneath, um, the panel on the, uh, um, back of our house.

Dispatcher: OK, there's a fire where?

Unidentified caller: Underneath, like, the panel on the back of our house.

Dispatcher: OK.

Unidentified caller: Like outside our back door.

Dispatcher: [Unintelligible]

Unidentified caller: Um, we are working on it.

Dispatcher: OK, we'll have somebody heading that way. How many people are in the house with you, hun?

Unidentified caller: Uh, we have, um, me and four kids and then, like, three cats.

Dispatcher: OK. Is it a small fire or a large fire?

Unidentified caller: It's a small fire. I know there's, um, some other people in the building, though, and we're trying to knock on their doors too.

Dispatcher: We're getting somebody heading out there, hun, OK?

Unidentified caller: OK.

Dispatcher: Alright, bye.

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