Hurricane Simon did more than batter Mexico's coast — according to Al Jazeera reporting, its passage on Sunday pushed the northeastern and central Pacific to a historic high for accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), a metric that combines the strength and longevity of every tropical storm in the region.

Twenty-one named storms have now been recorded in the Pacific this year, and the season has already surpassed the previous ACE high set in 2018. For weather watchers, that is the real story inside the headlines: not one destructive storm, but an entire basin rewriting its own record book mid-season.

At least five people died as the two systems hit Mexico's Pacific coast, a toll corroborated across multiple outlets. Guerrero Governor Evelyn Salgado said a 71-year-old man, identified by his family as Albino Moreno Jimenez, died when a retaining wall collapsed in Chilpancingo.

Baja California's prosecutor's office reported four members of one family, including two children, were found dead on the outskirts of Ensenada.

The Baja governor said a young girl was killed and people remained missing, with figures still preliminary — Al Jazeera reports La Jornada counted a higher toll of two dead and 11 missing in the state.

The emergency response was on a large scale. The Mexican army used helicopters to airlift 32 people, including 22 foreign nationals — Germans and Americans among them, per Euronews — from a flooded ranch in Ensenada, with missionaries attending a meeting caught in the surge.

Baja California Governor Marina del Pilar Ávila said roughly 14,000 federal and state personnel were deployed, and officials were sheltering more than 50 people, per the Guardian.

In Jalisco, Al Jazeera reports the government preventively evacuated 261 people, opening 13 temporary shelters with capacity for 1,900.

Simon has weakened from Category 4 to Category 2, with maximum sustained winds around 155 km/h (100 mph), and its centre sat roughly 115 km west-southwest of Cabo Corrientes, drifting slowly west.

The storm never made landfall, but the National Hurricane Center warned that 5 to 10 inches of rain over west-central Mexico could trigger life-threatening flooding and mudslides, with waves of up to five metres expected on some coasts.

The record ACE figure is being linked to El Niño, the phenomenon of rising Pacific water temperatures that is fuelling more intense hurricanes this season, as the Guardian and Free Malaysia Today both report.

The Guardian adds that meteorologists say the 2026-27 El Niño is certain to be the biggest ever recorded, and that scientists now think human-caused global heating is making El Niños more intense.

Officials urged residents not to return to affected areas until authorities declare them safe, with hurricane warnings in effect from Playa Pérula to El Roblito and Las Islas Marías, and hurricane watches extending toward Bahía Tempehuaya, according to Al Jazeera.

Rachel's remnants have moved north into Southern California and the Southwest, where most flood advisories were lifted by Monday after surges damaged a boardwalk in Long Beach and Las Vegas flooded at the weekend.