The Latest on Hurricane Katia and a major earthquake in Mexico (all times local):

The National Hurricane Center says Katia has weakened into a tropical storm as it moves further into Mexico, with wind speeds of up to 45 mph (72.4 kph).

Katia made landfall north of Tecolutla, Mexico late Friday as a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 75 mph (120 kph). Forecasters expect the hurricane to weaken quickly over the next 24 hours.

Elsewhere, a Category 5 Hurricane Irma left a string of deaths and damage across the Caribbean, battering Cuba late Friday with winds of 160 mph (257 kph) and bearing down on south Florida. To the east, Hurricane Jose, a Category 4 storm, was following behind, threatening further damage in Irma's wake.

One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico and a raging hurricane dealt a devastating one-two punch to the country, killing at least 61 people as workers scrambled to respond to the twin national emergencies.

The 8.1 quake off the southern Pacific coast just before midnight Thursday toppled hundreds of buildings in several states. Hardest-hit was Juchitan, Oaxaca, where 36 people died and a third of the city's homes collapsed or were otherwise rendered uninhabitable, President Enrique Pena Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network.

In downtown Juchitan, the remains of brick walls and clay tile roofs cluttered streets as families dragged mattresses onto sidewalks to spend a second anxious night sleeping outdoors. Some were newly homeless, while others feared further aftershocks could topple their cracked adobe dwellings.

Across the country, Hurricane Katia was roaring onshore north of Tecolutla in Veracruz state, pelting the region with intense rains and winds.</s>11Alive is taking you inside the eye of Hurricane Irma.

Reporters Neima Abdulahi and Joe Floccari are riding with the Air Force Reserves Hurricane Hunters as they go inside the storm on Sunday.

Watch 11Alive and refresh this page for updates.

►UPDATES: How Georgia will be impacted by Hurricane Irma</s>MEXICO CITY, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Hurricane Katia made landfall on Friday near the working-class beach resort of Tecolutla in the state of Veracruz on the Mexican Gulf coast, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

It lost some strength before it landed about 115 miles (185 km) northwest of the port city of Veracruz as a Category 1 storm with sustained winds 75 mph (120 km/h). The storm was expected to weaken rapidly over the next day, the NHC said.

Category 1 is the NHC's weakest hurricane designation while Category 5 is the strongest. Storms of Category 3 and above are defined as major hurricanes.

Mexico is also dealing with the aftermath of a powerful earthquake on Thursday night. The quake, the strongest to strike the country in more than 80 years, killed at least 61 people.

There are now three hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms in a century, made landfall in Cuba on Friday as a Category 5 storm. Millions of Florida residents were ordered to evacuate after the storm killed 21 people in the eastern Caribbean and left catastrophic destruction in its wake.

Hurricane Jose continued to gather strength far out in the Atlantic and it was nearing Category 5 strength as it churned about 435 miles (700 km) east-southeast of the Northern Leeward Islands.

Veracruz state officials said in a statement on Friday that the storm could cause landslides and flooding, and urged people living below hills and slopes to be prepared to evacuate.

Luis Felipe Puente, head of Mexico's national emergency services, said this week that Katia has "worrying characteristics" because it is very slow-moving and could dump a lot of rain on areas that have been saturated in recent weeks.

State oil and gas company Pemex has installations in and around the coast of Veracruz, but the firm has not reported any disruption to its operations. (Reporting by Michael O'Boyle; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)</s>As Hurricane Irma hits the U.S. mainland, it has left behind a path of destruction.</s>JUCHITAN, Mexico (AP) - The Latest on Hurricane Katia and a major earthquake in Mexico (all times local):

The U.S. National Hurricane Center says that Tropical Storm Katia is starting to stall over Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains.

Katia made landfall north of Tecolutla, Mexico late Friday as a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 75 mph (120 kph). It then was downgraded to a tropical storm and forecasters expect it to dissipate Saturday.

The hurricane center said that Katia's maximum sustained winds are now down to near 40 mph (65 kph) and that it is expected to drift east of the Sierra Madre mountains as it peters out.

The National Hurricane Center says Katia has weakened into a tropical storm as it moves further into Mexico, with wind speeds of up to 45 mph (72.4 kph).

Katia made landfall north of Tecolutla, Mexico late Friday as a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 75 mph (120 kph). Forecasters expect the hurricane to weaken quickly over the next 24 hours.

Elsewhere, a Category 5 Hurricane Irma left a string of deaths and damage across the Caribbean, battering Cuba late Friday with winds of 160 mph (257 kph) and bearing down on south Florida. To the east, Hurricane Jose, a Category 4 storm, was following behind, threatening further damage in Irma's wake.

One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico and a raging hurricane dealt a devastating one-two punch to the country, killing at least 61 people as workers scrambled to respond to the twin national emergencies.

The 8.1 quake off the southern Pacific coast just before midnight Thursday toppled hundreds of buildings in several states. Hardest-hit was Juchitan, Oaxaca, where 36 people died and a third of the city's homes collapsed or were otherwise rendered uninhabitable, President Enrique Pena Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network.

In downtown Juchitan, the remains of brick walls and clay tile roofs cluttered streets as families dragged mattresses onto sidewalks to spend a second anxious night sleeping outdoors. Some were newly homeless, while others feared further aftershocks could topple their cracked adobe dwellings.

Across the country, Hurricane Katia was roaring onshore north of Tecolutla in Veracruz state, pelting the region with intense rains and winds.</s>MEXICO CITY, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Hurricane Sandra strengthened to a Category 4 storm early on Thursday, the strongest recorded in the eastern Pacific Ocean this late in the year, as it headed toward Mexico’s coast, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Sandra, about 575 miles (925 km) south of the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula on Thursday morning, had maximum sustained winds of 145 mph (233 kmh), the NHC said.

The agency may issue tropical storm or hurricane watches for portions of the area later on Thursday, it said.

Last month, Hurricane Patricia, which at one point registered as one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded, landed on Mexico’s Pacific coast, but did not inflict major damage. (Reporting by Christine Murray; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)</s>- The first light of day shows Hurricane Irma has undergone some changes overnight. First off, sustained winds are down to 150 mph. Secondly, Irma is completing an eyewall replacement cycle and the eye continues to widen.

The diameter of the eye now is about 45 miles, which is good. Generally speaking, when the eye expands, the storm weakens while the wind field increases.

Think of a figure skater who is spinning. When she pulls her arms in, closer to her body, she spins much faster. When the skater extends her arms away from her body, the spin slows. It’s the same thing with a hurricane: When the eye expands, the storm spins slower.

The track of Irma is going to be very close to, if not on, the coast of Cuba. The storm’s interaction with land will more than likely weaken the storm further. I will be looking for intensity changes very closely.

The track forecast has not changed much. Nearly all the models are forecasting a storm running up the middle of Florida and the official forecast from the Hurricane Center follows along.

We have all seen the incredible photos of the damage in the Caribbean from Irma. Remember, that is Category 5 damage. The storm is not going to be a Category 5 when it is over Central Florida. Also not a Category 4, probably not a Category 3. More than likely a Category 2.

While that is certainly no picnic, the trend towards a weaker hurricane is good.

We will all get through this. Just do what you are doing. Finish up your preparations and do not stress.</s>Hurricane and storm surge warnings are issued for south Florida

and the Florida Keys. Hurricane watches extend up to the central

Florida peninsula.



At 10:00 AM CDT, the eye of Hurricane Irma was located

405 miles southeast of Miami, Florida. Irma is moving toward

the west-northwest near 14 mph, and this motion is

expected to continue for the next day or two with a decrease in

forward speed. A turn toward the northwest is expected by late

Saturday. On the forecast track, the eye of Irma should continue toward the

Bahamas, and north of Cuba today and into the day Saturday.

Maximum sustained winds are near 150 mph with higher

gusts. Irma is a strong Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson

Hurricane Wind Scale. Some fluctuations in intensity are likely

during the next day or two, but Irma is forecast to remain a

powerful Category 4 hurricane during the next couple of days.

Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 70 miles from

the center, and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 185

miles.

Hurricane Jose is now a major hurricane and could be impacting some of the islands

Irma first encountered a couple days ago. As of 10 AM Friday, Irma and Jose have winds of 150 mph.

That's the first time in recorded history the Atlantic has had two hurricanes with 150 mph+ winds.

There is also Hurricane Katia, near Mexico. This storm is forecast to be stationary before

moving into Mexico and weaken.</s>Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

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Not even halfway into the 2017 hurricane season, and before Irma makes landfall in Florida, tropical mega-storms in the Atlantic basin have already broken several records, and challenged others, experts say.

A few that stand out, so far:

– So strong for so long –

As it swept across the Caribbean, Hurricane Irma generated winds averaging just over 295 kilometres per hour (185 miles per hour) for more than 33 hours, longer than any super-storm of comparable power ever recorded.

“Such an intensity, for such a long period, has never been observed in the satellite era” that began in the early 1970s, Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster at Meteo France, said.

The runner up is Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,000 people dead or missing in the Philippines and packed winds of the same speed for 24 hours in 2013.

Irma was the first hurricane on record to reach Category 5 status — the highest intensity level — while still in the Atlantic Ocean, before entering the balmy waters of the Caribbean Sea, according to the US National Hurricane Center.

The fact that the swirling mass of clouds and water was able to turbo-charge over the Atlantic — whose waters are cooler than the Caribbean but warmer than a few decades ago — is consistent with global warming, scientists say.

Category 5 tropical storms produce sustained winds of at least 252 km/h for at least a minute at a time. Irma has since dropped down to Category 4.

Hurricane Irma has so far caused more than $10 billion (8.3 billion euros) in economic losses across the Caribbean, making it the costliest storm ever for the region’s island nations and territories, according to the Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology, based in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The tally is sure to rise as the storm hits the Bahamas on its way to Florida, but it has already surpassed the damage record set by Hurricanes Ike in 2008, and Hugo in 1989, at $9.4 billion each in today’s dollars.

Hardest hit by Irma were Sint Maarten ($2.5 billion) and the US Virgin Islands ($2.45 billion), followed by Saint Martin ($1.55 billion) and the British Virgin Islands ($1.4 billion), according to the estimate.

 – Rain, rain, rain –

Tropical storm Harvey — which made landfall in Texas as a Category 4 hurricane on August 25 — dumped more rain in places than any cyclone ever measured on the continental United States.

In one area southeast of Houston, Harvey unloaded more than 125 centimetres of water (nearly 50 inches), breaking the previous record (122 cm) set by cyclone Amelia.

The highest sustained wind speed ever registered for an Atlantic basin storm was 305 km/h (190 mph), for Hurricane Allen, which caused several hundred deaths in Haiti and over a billion dollars in damage.

With consistent winds of 295 km/h, Irma shares the title of second-fastest hurricane with Wilma (2005), Gilbert (1988) and the notorious “Labour Day” storm that devastated southern Florida in 1935.

Along with Irma, the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico is host to two other hurricanes: the Category 4 Jose, projected to leave inhabited islands largely untouched on its northwest trajectory, and Category 2 Katia, due to make landfall in the Mexican state of Veracruz.

Three-at-once is not unprecedented, but it is rare — it last occurred in 2010. Those storms, however, spun harmlessly in the Atlantic, while this time, two of them are hitting land.

The event of four active hurricanes hitting at one time has happened twice — in 1893 and 1998 when Hurricanes Georges, Ivan, Jeanne and Karl all raged simultaneously. – AFP</s>JUCHITAN, Mexico — One of the most powerful earthquakes ever to hit Mexico was followed by a Gulf coast hurricane, dealing a one-two punch to the country, killing at least 61 people as workers scrambled to respond to the twin national emergencies.

The 8.1 quake off the southern Pacific coast just before midnight Thursday toppled hundreds of buildings in several states. Hardest-hit was Juchitan, Oaxaca, where 36 people died and a third of the city’s homes collapsed or were uninhabitable, President Enrique Pena Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network.

In downtown Juchitan, the remains of brick walls and clay tile roofs cluttered streets as families dragged mattresses onto sidewalks to spend a second anxious night sleeping outdoors. Some were newly homeless, while others feared further aftershocks could topple their cracked adobe dwellings.

“We are all collapsed, our homes and our people,” said Rosa Elba Ortiz Santiago, 43, who sat with her teenage son and more than a dozen neighbors on an assortment of chairs. “We are used to earthquakes, but not of this magnitude.”

Even as she spoke, across the country, Hurricane Katia was roaring onshore north of Tecolutla in Veracruz state, pelting the region with intense rains and winds.

MORE: Hurricanes Irma, Jose and Katia could all hit land this weekend

Waiting for Jose: Caribbean braces for second potent storm

The U.S. National Hurricane Center reported Katia’s maximum sustained winds had dropped to 75 mph when it made landfall. And it rapidly weakened even further over land into a tropical depression before dawn. The center said Katia was stalling over Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains, where it could bring 10 to 15 inches of rain to a region with a history of deadly mudslides and flooding.

Pena Nieto announced that the earthquake killed 45 people in Oaxaca state, 12 in Chiapas and 4 in Tabasco, and he declared three days of national mourning. The toll included 36 dead in Juchitan, located on the narrow waist of Oaxaca known as the Isthmus, where a hospital and about half the city hall also collapsed into rubble.

Next to Ortiz, 47-year-old Jose Alberto Martinez said he and family members have long been accustomed to earthquakes. So, when the ground started moving, at first they simply waited a bit for it to stop — until objects began falling and they bolted for the street.

“We felt like the house was coming down on top of us,” Martinez said, accompanied by his wife, son and mother-in-law.

Now, he didn’t feel safe going back inside until the home is inspected. Right next door, an older building had crumbled into a pile of rough timbers, brick and stucco, while little remained of a white church on the corner.

Rescuers searched for survivors Friday with sniffer dogs and used heavy machinery at the main square to pull rubble away from city hall, where a missing police officer was believed to be inside.

The city’s civil defense coordinator, Jose Antonio Marin Lopez, said similar searches had been going on all over the area.

Teams found bodies in the rubble, but the highlight was pulling four people, including two children, alive from the completely collapsed Hotel Del Rio where one woman died.

“The priority continues to be the people,” Marin said.

Pena Nieto said authorities were working to re-establish supplies of water and food and provide medical attention to those who need it. He vowed the government would help rebuild.

“The power of this earthquake was devastating, but we are certain that the power of unity, the power of solidarity and the power of shared responsibility will be greater,” Pena Nieto said.

Power was cut at least briefly to more than 1.8 million people, and authorities closed schools in at least 11 states to check them for safety.

The Interior Department reported that 428 homes were destroyed and 1,700 were damaged just in Chiapas, the state closest to the epicenter.

“Homes made of clay tiles and wood collapsed,” said Nataniel Hernandez, a human rights worker living in Tonala, Chiapas, who worried that inclement weather threatened to bring more structures down.

“Right now, it is raining very hard in Tonala, and with the rains it gets much more complicated because the homes were left very weak, with cracks,” Hernandez said by phone.

The earthquake also jolted the Mexican capital, more than 650 miles (1,000 kilometers) away, which largely lies atop a former lakebed whose soil amplifies seismic waves. Memories are still fresh for many of a catastrophic quake that killed thousands and devastated large parts of the city in 1985.

Mexico City escaped major damage, though part of a bridge on a highway being built to a new international airport collapsed due to the earthquake, local media reported.

The quake’s power was equal to Mexico’s strongest in the past century, and it was slightly stronger than the 1985 quake, the U.S. Geological Survey said. However, its impact was blunted somewhat by the fact that it struck some 100 miles offshore.

The epicenter was in a seismic hotspot in the Pacific where one tectonic plate dives under another. Such subduction zones are responsible for some of the biggest quakes in history, including the 2011 Fukushima disaster and the 2004 Sumatra quake that spawned a deadly tsunami.

In the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, tourists abandoned coastal hotels as winds and rains picked up ahead of Hurricane Katia’s landfall and workers set up emergency shelters.

“The arrival of (hashtag)Katia may be particularly dangerous for slopes affected by the earthquake. Avoid these areas,” Pena Nieto tweeted.

Associated Press writers Peter Orsi and Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.
Hurricane Katia makes landfall in Mexico as a Category 1 hurricane, causing heavy damage and at least two deaths.