Yucatan Resorts Dodge Emily Bullet

No Deaths Or Major Damage Reported On Mexico's Riviera Maya Coast

(CBS/AP)  By 8 a.m. EDT, winds had decreased to near 100 mph, and three hours later, the hurricane was till moving west at about 17 mph. Emily was about 575 miles from Brownsville, Texas.

In Cancun, hundreds of buses moved more than 25,000 people — mostly tourists — to temporary shelters on Sunday, evacuating them from hotels and low-lying seaside neighborhoods in Cancun being battered by strong waves.

They were among the nearly 60,000 tourists being evacuated statewide from resorts like Tulum, Playa de Carmen and Cozumel, an island famous for its diving. Cancun's airport closed Sunday afternoon after thousands lined up at ticket counters, trying to get flights out before the storm hit.

Hundreds of mostly foreign tourists lay shoulder-to-shoulder on thin foam pads in a sweltering gymnasium near the center of Cancun. They were given free bottled water and sandwiches, but many gasped when a hard rain rattled the metal roof of the building.

"It's hot in here," said Beth McGhee, 46, a tourist from Independence, Mo. "We feel like we've been kept in the dark until this morning. But we're safe, and that's what's important."

"There's no power, no air conditioning. It was about 97 degrees during the day here yesterday, so you can imagine it was a long, hot, uncomfortable night in those shelters," said Cowan.

"We want to get out of here as quick as we can. We all smell and there is no fresh running water," said British tourist Jarham Briehtol.

Power was knocked out all along the coast, as Emily's winds snapped concrete utility poles along a half-mile stretch of highway between Playa del Carmen and Cancun. Ground floor windows were shattered in most businesses in Playa del Carmen, and residents waded through knee-deep water along some streets.

Mexico's state-owned oil company said Sunday 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 aircraft was part of a fleet of 15 ships and 26 helicopters working to transfer 15,500 oil workers to shore. The platform evacuations closed 63 wells and halted the production of 480,000 barrels of oil per day.

In Jamaica, which Emily had hit earlier, searchers on Sunday found the 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 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.