Andrea Fernandez, who is eight months pregnant, is distraught, unable to let her husband in another state know that she is fine after Hurricane Otis devastated the scenic resort of Acapulco, on Mexico's Pacific coast, leaving at least 27 dead.

But "there is no (cellular) service. I haven't been able to communicate for three days," she said, jostling on a bridge with about 20 others keen to make a call or text to let loved ones know that they are well.

"I'm desperate," she said through tears.

This picturesque tourist haunt, which lured Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley in the 1950s and '60s, is now a bustling city of 780,000 people, living in high-rises and houses on hills and mountains.

But it had never experienced a Category 5 hurricane like Otis which — in a single day — killed at least 39 people and made local landmarks built over decades look like they had been bombed. 

Cell phones intermittently pick up signals in some parts of the port, but the situation is hit or miss.

One local woman could be overheard telling her loved ones: "There is no way to get out of here! I'll talk to you again when I can. Everything here is gone. It's horrible."

Some disgruntled survivors have told local media they were angry to hear tourists were taken to safe places to ride out the storm — in sharp contrast to the population as a whole. 

At one point, some tourists keen to contact kin approached journalists on the port's main avenue, Costera Miguel Aleman, asking them to pass on details of a sick person who needed to be evacuated from a damaged building.

Francisco Perez, 50, is desperate to get word to his mother. He has accused the authorities of a grossly inadequate response to the devastation Otis wrought.

"(They put) some portable (phone) antennas at a couple of places, but… what are we supposed to do?" he asked angrily, as people's focus began turning to the lack of reliable water and food.

Otis strengthened with dramatic speed, growing in just hours from a tropical storm to the most powerful category of the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale before hitting land early Wednesday.

The World Meteorological Organization described the hurricane as "one of the most rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones on record," exceeded in modern times only by another Pacific hurricane, Patricia, in 2015.

The speed with which Otis intensified took the government and weather forecasters by surprise, leaving little time to issue warnings and prepare residents for its arrival.