MEXICO CITY — Meteorologists called Hurricane Patricia one of the most ferocious ever seen in the Western Hemisphere, a monster bearing down with unprecedented energy on the Pacific coast of Mexico on Friday as residents and tourists evacuated or hunkered down in fear. But just hours later, the storm had passed over and, despite uprooted trees, landslides blocking some roads and the destruction of humble homes, there were no immediate reports of any deaths or damage to major infrastructure.

Experts said that the result was a combination of luck — the storm, for instance, passed between two cities but hit neither directly — and capable planning in a country that had learned from past disasters.

The Mexican authorities “learned some hard lessons” from botched or inadequate responses to earlier catastrophes, said Richard Olson, the director of the Extreme Events Institute at Florida International University in Miami. “It looks like they got this one right.”

Mexico now has a national emergency response system that reaches from the central government to the local level. “There was a strong learning curve and they put resources into it,” Mr. Olson said, although he said the system was not able to prevent deaths when separate storms hit the country’s Gulf and Pacific coasts in the same week two years ago. With Hurricane Patricia, Mr. Olson said, Mexican authorities had done a good job of warning local residents, through announcements on radio and television and social media. He said they had also done good work in evacuating people ahead of the storm — a process that began before it quickly blew up into a Category 5 hurricane with winds measured at 200 miles per hour.