Hurricane Simon Pounds Mexico's Coast as Southwest Flood Risk From Rachel Eases

ENSENADA, Mexico

Two tropical systems spent the weekend redrawing the map of the Pacific coast, and on Monday the damage reports caught up. Hurricane Simon pounded western Mexico with wind and rain for another day, its eye holding offshore while its outer bands slammed the coastline between the Sierra Madre and the Pacific near Puerto Vallarta. The Associated Press, reporting Monday, said the tropical weather systems had caused five deaths and damage across Pacific coastal towns and resorts.

The toll was still being assembled from separate state reports. In Guerrero, Governor Evelyn Salgado told a news conference that a 71-year-old man died after a wall collapsed in Chilpancingo, the state capital, and that Simon's winds had uprooted trees and electricity poles, blocked roads and flooded homes in coastal towns including the port city of Acapulco. Farther north, Baja California Governor Marina del Pilar said a young girl had died in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Rachel, at least 10 people were reported missing, and officials were assisting more than 50 people in temporary shelters, with some 14,000 federal and state personnel deployed across the state.

Simon Is Not Done Yet

Forecasters expect the threat to linger. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Monday that Simon is expected to remain a hurricane through midweek and could strengthen again before turning toward a landfall near Sinaloa on Thursday. Rain of 5 to 10 inches across west-central Mexico in the coming days could produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides, the center warned.

In Puerto Vallarta, the picture on Monday was one of cautious reopening: workers pulled wooden panels off storefronts and businesses opened again as the rain eased, even as the resort's international airport suspended operations until Tuesday morning. One tourism worker quoted by the AP urged people to stay on alert, noting the storm could still arrive, shift course or fall apart — an uncertainty everyone on that coast now has to live with for several more days.

North of the Border, the Water Recedes

Rachel, meanwhile, weakened into a post-tropical cyclone as it moved north into Southern California, where unusually large waves tore apart a section of boardwalk in Long Beach and pushed seawater into homes, forcing evacuations — damage our earlier reporting covered in detail from the Alamitos Peninsula. In Las Vegas, the storm's remnants delivered 1.08 inches of rain into Sunday morning, tying the city's all-time daily rainfall record for October, a mark set in 1947, according to the National Weather Service. According to USA TODAY, video from the weekend showed water rushing through a street near the Strip.

By late Monday, the immediate threat across the Southwest was fading. Weather service meteorologist Andrew Orrison said localized flash flooding remained a risk on Monday and that the worst of Rachel had passed, though disturbed weather was still lingering; flood advisories were mostly lifted across Utah, Arizona and elsewhere in the region. In Utah, the weekend system had stranded participants in the Moab 240 ultramarathon, and dozens of runners and volunteers were evacuated Sunday after flooding cut them off along the route through canyon country. Forecasters said the additional rain still expected in the region comes from a separate weather system moving across the West, with precipitation forecast to end by Wednesday.

How the Weekend Built to This

Neither system arrived quietly. Simon had earlier in its life reached Category 4 strength off Mexico's coast before weakening to the Category 2 storm forecasters tracked on Monday, and its size meant the coast felt it for days rather than hours — first the alerts and precautionary evacuations in Jalisco and Colima that our earlier reporting documented, then the flooding and downed infrastructure reported from Guerrero on Monday. Rachel followed the opposite arc: a tropical storm that fell apart over land but whose moisture plume reached hundreds of miles inland, which is how a desert city ends up tying a rainfall record set in 1947.

In Las Vegas, the weekend's rain was not an abstraction. The New York Post reported video showing a driver stranded on the roof of her car as fast-moving floodwater swelled around the vehicle, with other cars partially submerged nearby, before emergency crews brought her to safety. The New York Post also described dozens of rescue calls across the valley as streets turned to rivers, and USA TODAY reported flooding at the parking garage at The LINQ and near the Sphere. The National Weather Service had warned that showers and thunderstorms could continue into Monday with cooler-than-normal temperatures. It is the recurring lesson of desert flooding: the ground and pavement shed water instead of absorbing it, so an inch of rain that would be unremarkable in the Midwest becomes a public-safety event in southern Nevada.

For the Southwest, then, Monday closed the book on Rachel — a record-setting, street-flooding weekend that the desert was never built for. For Mexico's Pacific coast, the book stays open: Simon is still out there, still a hurricane, and still a few days from its expected meeting with land.

Earlier coverage: our report on the red-tagged homes on Long Beach's Alamitos Peninsula and on Hurricane Simon's approach to Mexico's coast, on the Previously news front.