Hurricane Emily swept over Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula today, snapping power lines in half, flooding streets and shattering windows.

Thousands of tourists in the popular resorts of Cancun, Playa de Carmen and Cozumel fled their hotels to spend the night in cramped, improvised shelters along eastern side of the peninsula as the Category 2 storm hit land.

Emily is forecast to continue west-northwest at 17 mph, and will emerge into the Gulf of Mexico later today, cross the Gulf tomorrow and strike mainland North America once again near the Texas border, according to the National Hurricane Centre in Miami.

The storm’s wind speeds had soared to as much as 135 mph (215 kph), making it a Category 4 when it struck Jamaica on Saturday, killing four people.

There have been no reports of deaths or serious injuries in Mexico, but tourists have had their holidays turned into a nightmare.

"All night long, cold water was pouring in through the holes in the wall," said Graham Brighton of Leicester, one of about 1,000 people who spent the night on thin foam pads thrown onto a gymnasium floor in Cancun. "There were just far too many people crammed into one space," he added.

Emily is the second hurricane to hit the region in the past two weeks. Hurricane Dennis left at least 62 people dead, mostly in Haiti, before hitting Cuba and the south-east of the US.

Damage from the storm was evident everywhere on the Mayan Riviera today, where white-sand beaches and turquoise waters attract both Mexican and foreign tourists.

Power was knocked out all along the coast as Emily’s winds snapped concrete utility poles in two along a half-mile stretch of highway between the resort of Playa del Carmen and Cancun to the north.

Plate-glass windows were shattered on the ground floors of most businesses in Playa del Carmen, while residents waded through knee-deep water along some streets.

About 60,000 tourists were evacuated all together from Cancun, Tulum, Playa de Carmen and Cozumel, an island just south of Cancun famous for its diving.

Mexico’s state-owned oil company said yesterday that two pilots were killed in the Gulf of Mexico when their helicopter was downed by strong winds as they tried to land on an offshore oil rig to evacuate workers.

The evacuations closed 63 wells and halted the production of 480,000 barrels of oil per day. Cancun’s airport closed yesterday afternoon after thousands lined up at ticket counters, trying to get flights out before the storm hit.

In Jamaica, rescuers found four bodies trapped inside a car, which was filled with mud and other debris, police said. A man, a woman, an infant boy and his 5-year-old sister had been driving through a flooded rural road in southwest Jamaica when a surge of water pushed them over a cliff, police said.

The Cayman Islands has escaped major damage. The islands and a handful of other Caribbean countries were devastated last year when three catastrophic hurricanes, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, tore through the region with a collective ferocity not seen in years, causing hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damage.

Cancun’s last big evacuation was for Hurricane Gilbert, which killed some 300 people in Mexico and the Caribbean in 1988. But the city and surrounding resort areas had only about 8,000 hotel rooms then. That number has since grown to more than 50,000.

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