Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said 27 people died when hurricane devastated Acapulco.

At least 27 people were killed and three others remained missing a full day after Mexico’s strongest hurricane in recent memory slammed into the resort city of Acapulco, destroying homes, hotels and shopping centers and submerging entire neighborhoods in debris-strewn floodwaters.

“It was very destroyed,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said of Acapulco on Thursday. “There’s no precedent for this in recent times.”

Hurricane Otis made landfall as a Category 5 storm early Wednesday morning, communication with the city and nearby regions was still mostly down, and hundreds of thousands of residents were without electricity.

Mexico’s national power utility said the region’s electrical infrastructure was severely damaged, and that crews were working to repair 37 transmission lines, 26 substations and a major power station that had been knocked offline.

Images filtering out of Acapulco showed incredible devastation: Towering condos missing roofs and facades, large yachts lifted from the sea and tossed onto land and miles of roads and neighborhoods under water. The commercial and military airports, both flooded and damaged, remained closed.

López Obrador managed to visit the city late Wednesday after crews opened the highway connecting Acapulco to Mexico City, which had been closed for hours by a mudslide.

The president said emergency crews were heading to the city to assist residents, restore power and survey the damage. Some seemed frustrated by what they viewed as a slow response.

“When is the government ever going to look after the common people?” a woman named Isabel de la Cruz told a journalist with the Associated Press on Thursday as she tried to move a shopping cart loaded with goods taken from a store — diapers, instant noodles and toilet paper — through the mud.

She and her family survived the storm, but it blew off the tin roof of their home, she said.

The intensity of the storm took the government and many residents by surprise.

Just 24 hours before it struck, meteorologists were predicting it would make landfall as a relatively light Category 1 hurricane.

But after hitting a patch of warm ocean water, it quickly picked up power, becoming one of the fastest growing hurricanes ever observed.

Hours before it hit, the National Hurricane Center warned of a “potentially catastrophic Category 5 hurricane.” The center said a “nightmare scenario” loomed as the storm bore down on a city of nearly 1 million residents who had been given little time to prepare.

Guests cowered inside beachfront hotels as windows shattered.

“I began to pray, to meditate, to try and calm myself although the panic was so great that the only thing I asked for was one more chance,” said a woman named Luisa Peña in a video circulated widely on X, formerly known as Twitter. She said she hid in a closet in her Acapulco hotel room as the ceiling collapsed, the windows blew out and the floors flooded.

López Obrador said that among the government officials heading to Acapulco were 1,000 people tasked with surveying the damage to homes and businesses as well as farmland in more rural coastal areas that were also hit hard.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.