Dean Expected to Make Landfall near Mexico-Belize Border

CANCUN, Mexico — Posh resorts and Mayan villages up and down this coast braced for the arrival of a potentially monstrous Hurricane Dean early Tuesday morning, as tourists scrambled to find flights or shelter.

By Monday evening, Dean had morphed into a Category 5 storm — the most powerful type of hurricane, with winds of 160 mph — and was expected to make landfall sometime near dawn.

Officials were predicting Dean would slam into the Yucatan Peninsula near Chetumal, Mexico, some 230 miles south of Cancun.

That would be welcome relief for the resort area, which saw its famous white sand beaches pulverized by 2005's Hurricane Wilma. Cancun is just wrapping up the first stages of a $23 million, 9-month beach restoration project, and is considered highly vulnerable to severe weather.

Cancun officials told the public Monday night that the area should escape the worst of Dean's wrath.

Not so lucky could be Chetumal, a port city near the Belize border, and Tulum, a gorgeous area of Mayan ruins along the Caribbean coast that draws more of a backpacker crowd than Cancun.

Throughout the day on Monday hordes of tourists struggled to catch flights out of Cancun before the airport closed at 7 p.m. Scott Palmer, a 36-year-old general manager from New Zealand, cut his Cancun vacation short, but said it wasn't easy finding a flight.

"It was chaos here this morning," he said. "It was something out of a movie. People were fighting to get out of this place."

Antonio Alvaro, a boyish-looking security guard at the airport, said most of the workers in Cancun would likely try to ride out the storm. He said he did the same two years ago after Wilma devastated the region.

"The worst part is the days after, when you run out of food," he said. "We hope it's not as bad as before, but it's just a phenomenon we have to deal with here."

The Mexican government evacuated 7,500 people from the Yucatan Peninsula on Monday and President Felipe Calderon cut short a summit in Canada to return home, according to Mexican press reports. The hurricane is expected to churn across the Yucatan Peninsula for about a day before diving into the Gulf of Mexico and picking up speed.

The Pemex oil company evacuated more than 14,000 workers from oil wells in the Gulf, shutting down production in the region, the Associated Press reported. At least 12 people have died as the storm churned across the Caribbean.

Although it appeared Dean would hit northern Mexico, and not Texas, after it emerged once again from the Gulf, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he was taking no chances, mobilizing the National Guard, shipping up to 80,000 barrels of gasoline to the Rio Grande Valley, and getting a pre-emptive federal disaster declaration from President Bush, the Associated Press reported.

Cancun was eerily quiet Monday evening with most buildings and businesses boarded up and military jeeps filled with soldiers patrolling the city. The most action was to be found at the few gas stations that remained open, which had long lines of nervous motorists.

Christine and David Slinger, a retired couple from Dallas, were riding the storm out in a downtown Cancun hotel after frantically looking for a spare room in this boarded up city. The couple, which owns a condo along the coast, originally drove to Chetumal, thinking the storm would hit Cancun, and then hurried back when it became clear Dean was headed to the south.

"We just bought another place (in this area) so we're really hoping for the best," Christine Slinger said.