{"id":19472,"date":"2018-10-22T22:24:04","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T22:24:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19472"},"modified":"2018-10-22T22:24:04","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T22:24:04","slug":"potentially-catastrophic-hurricane-willa-barrels-towards-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19472","title":{"rendered":"‘Potentially catastrophic’ Hurricane Willa barrels towards Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A “potentially catastrophic” Category-5 hurricane is moving quickly through the Pacific Ocean and is predicted to pound<\/a> western Mexico’s shores on Tuesday, according to the US-based National Hurricane Center (NHC).<\/p>\n

Although Hurricane Willa is expected to lose force by the time it makes landfall, NHC said it will likely remain a major storm of Category-3 intensity and could produce “life-threatening flash flooding and landslides over much of southwestern and west-central Mexico”.<\/p>\n

The hurricane is expected to pass over or near the Islas Marias – a set of islands about 96km offshore that includes a nature preserve and a federal prison – early on Tuesday, then blow ashore in the afternoon or the evening between the resort town of Mazatlan and San Blas, a distance of about 220km.<\/p>\n

The governments of Sinaloa and Nayarit states ordered coastal region schools to close and have begun preparing emergency shelters.<\/p>\n

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A man works trying to protect a restaurant before the arrival of\u00a0Hurricane Willa<\/span> in Mazatlan [Daniel Slim\/AFP]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Mazatlan, with a metropolitan-area population of about 500,000, is a popular holiday spot. The hurricane’s projected track also included Esquinapa, a town a few miles inland with almost 60,000 people in and around it.<\/p>\n

As of midday on Monday, Willa was centred about 215km south-southwest of Cabo Corrientes and was moving at 11km\/h.<\/p>\n

Hurricane-force winds extended 45km from the storm’s centre, and tropical storm-force winds were up to 1,650km out.<\/p>\n

Farther to the south, another storm, Tropical Storm Vicente, weakened but was still expected to produce heavy rainfall and flooding over parts of southern and southwestern Mexico.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A “potentially catastrophic” Category-5 hurricane is moving quickly through the Pacific Ocean and is predicted to pound western Mexico’s shores on Tuesday, according to the US-based National Hurricane Center (NHC). Although Hurricane Willa is expected to lose force by the time it makes landfall, NHC said it will likely remain a major storm of Category-3…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}