No casualties related to the strongest hurricane on record that slammed Mexico's Pacific coast were reported. Also, the damage that the storm left in its path wasn't as devastating as earlier believed - a fact that has astonished some observers and survivors.
According to weather experts, this outcome was largely due to the fact that the hurricane hit a rather sparsely populated area.
"The amount of damage is going to be entirely dependent on where the storm hits," Clime Central meteorologist Sean Sublette told Time. "If it had been a more heavily populated area, we'd be having a much different conversation."
Apparently, Patricia "hit a sparsely populated area, avoiding direct hits on the resort of Puerto Vallarta and port city of Manzanillo," Yahoo! News said.
Also, the mountainous terrain it passed through weakened the storm from a Category 5, 200-mph roarer to a Category 4 storm. It had weakened to about 168 mph when it made landfall at Cuixmala, which is "a luxury retreat in a sparsely populated ocean reserve" according to Time.
Further, the storm moved at 20 miles per hour, which means that it did not linger in one place long enough to wreak too much havoc and cause massive flooding.
Fortunately, storm surges did not build up along the coast, partially because Patricia turned into a Category 5 howler from a tropical storm very quickly, according to International Hurricane Research Center director Richard S. Olson.
Additionally, Patricia's wind corridor was particularly narrow - only 15 miles wide on both sides of its eye. Its hurricane force winds is reportedly only at 35 miles.
"Patricia's Category 5 winds were confined to a relatively narrow swath ... and this swath missed major cities," explained Weather Underground's Jeff Masters.
Finally, a key factor to the lessened damage sustained in the wake of the record-breaking storm is the preparations made and the compliance to warnings.
"One reason there were apparently no fatalities was that people paid attention to warnings," The New York Times noted. "Schools shut down, stores and businesses closed and people heeded the advisories to stay indoors or move to shelters. When trees and lampposts fell, there was nobody outside who could be hurt."
"Mexican officials said over 1,780 shelters had been set up for more than 240,000 people," CNN reported. "About 3,500 people from a small island off the coast of Colima state remained in shelters."
"The 'warning-alert-evacuate-then hunker down' combination seems to have worked to limit the human losses from the wind component of the hazard," Olson observed. "Local, state, and national authorities seemed to have gotten this one right."
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