Hurricane Season, Explained From the Coast

Polo is sitting off the Pacific coast as a Category 5 this week, which makes it a good time for a question anyone considering a beach town should be asking, and most don't. What does hurricane season actually mean once you live there?

First, the calendar. Pacific season runs May 15 to November 30. Atlantic season, which covers the Gulf and the Caribbean side, runs June 1 to November 30. Storms can form outside those dates, but they mostly don't. The busy stretch on both coasts is August through October, and that matters more than the official dates. If you are a snowbird who arrives in November and leaves in April, you will miss nearly all of it. If you live here year-round, you plan around it the way Canadians plan around January.

Second, the numbers. Long-term averages run about 15 named storms a year in the Pacific and 14 in the Atlantic. Most of them never touch Mexico. They form, spin out to sea, and get a name nobody remembers. A few brush the coast with rain and surf. Every few years one comes ashore hard. That is the honest shape of it. Long quiet stretches, then one bad week. This year has a strange footnote. As of this week the Atlantic has not produced a single hurricane, the longest any season on record has gone without one, while the Pacific keeps producing monsters. The super El Niño gets the credit for both.

Third, geography. The coast takes the hit, meaning the Pacific side from Oaxaca up through Jalisco, Sinaloa and the southern Baja peninsula, and the Caribbean side around the Yucatán Peninsula. Inland cities like San Miguel, Querétaro and Mexico City sit behind the Sierra Madre, which chews up the wind before it arrives. They get the rain and the flooding, not the storm. If storms are your dealbreaker, that is your answer, and it is a good one.

Now the part nobody likes. In October 2023, Otis went from a tropical storm to a Category 5 in under 24 hours and hit Acapulco with 165 mph winds. The day before, the forecast said a Category 1 at worst. It was the strongest Pacific landfall on record, and the forecasters did not see it coming. The lesson is that you prepare before the forecast is sure, because sometimes it never gets sure.

Here is what preparing looks like in practice.

• Ask about the exact street before you rent or buy. Drainage, ground-floor exposure, whether the access road floods. Two houses a block apart can have completely different storm weeks.
• Ask what happened in the last big storm. Landlords and neighbours know. A building that came through fine is worth more than one with a better view.
• Learn the colours. Mexico's civil protection alert system, SIAT-CT, runs blue, green, yellow, orange, red. Blue means a storm exists but is more than 72 hours out. Red means stay inside. Follow Conagua's weather service on X or Facebook and your state's Protección Civil page. That is where the real updates come from.
• Keep the basics on hand. Water, cash, a charged power bank, medications, and copies of your passport and residency card somewhere dry. Power goes out before the wind gets bad, and the ATM goes with it.
• If you own, confirm your insurance covers wind and flood. If you rent, ask your landlord what happens if it does not.
• Save 911. It works for police, ambulance, fire and civil protection.

The upside is real too. Most seasons on the coast pass with a few grey days, a couple of big-surf mornings, and a lot of checking the hurricane centre map with your coffee. Not nothing, but a long way from the disaster movie.