Hurricane Otis interrupted tropical vacations for some visitors and put a stop to a mining convention in Acapulco, Mexico, as the storm bore down on the city early Wednesday.
Among the travelers affected was David Hall, 34, who had arrived on Tuesday from Colima, a city about 300 miles northwest of Acapulco. Mr. Hall works in sales and was in Acapulco for the mining convention. “It’s been getting worse since I arrived,” he said of the weather conditions that deteriorated throughout the night.
“The wind was so strong, it was so much noise,” Mr. Hall said in an interview. “It was really terrifying. The wind was really, really fast.”
He compared the swaying of the hotel where he was staying, the Princess Mundo Imperial, to a “small earthquake,” adding, “It’s a very apocalyptic picture here.”
The hotel staff, he said, had split guests into groups and were hosting some of them in large meeting spaces. A video that Mr. Hall sent from the scene showed hundreds of people cramped inside a large meeting space — some were seen chatting among one another, while others were sprawled across the floor.
Mr. Hall said that although the atmosphere was calming down by Wednesday morning, he was not sure that the convention would go on.
“I need to find a way to go back to my family,” he said. “This was a work trip, and it just turned over into a really bad situation.”
