More bitching about lack of hurricane preparedness

The local press is reporting that the hotels in Cancun were built to resist Category 2 hurricanes. During the watch for Hurricane Ivan, which was category 5 at the time, they did not evacuate the hotels. Those tourists have doubtless since gone home since, not knowing that the city put their lives in jeopardy.

Today Hurricane Jeanne is preparing to hit Florida. They are saying Floridians should prepare for 3 weeks with no power. It makes me wonder how long we'll go without power when we're hit.

The Cat Thing

Once a long time ago I had a cat. She died. I never got over it. She died suddenly, within a few days. She was a little sweet calico that looked like a pile of dirty rags. Her name was Olivia, which became Livy but morphed into Merpie because of the way she would make merp sounds when she talked to me.

Three weeks ago, on a Friday while running in the Parque Ecologico Kabah I heard a mew. Then another. I rounded the corner and found a tiny little calico kitten. She rushed to me. I couldn't find a reason for her to be there in the middle of the park by herself. I heard no other kittens mewing, and there was no mama around. I scooped her up and brought her home where she purred her way through a bowl of kibble. I installed her in my office with food, water and a litterbox (away from my other cats), then I went back to the park to finish my run.

My husband came back that night from a trip and started with "we can't keep her" (we have 3 other gatos living IN the house and more strays that we feed). So I've avoided getting attached, well, I've tried. But she's so friendly. She's the kind of cat that gives cats a good reputation. She's all love and adoration. She's a ball of love. She's a permanent furry hug. She's lying in front of the monitor right now listening to my typing and to Eddie Vedder croning "Strangest Tribe".

So two days ago we dragged the poor missy off to the vet (along with a neighborhood stray) to get spayed. What a nasty business, getting all opened up and chopped up inside. No babies for you my love. Somehow knowing that a cat or dog will never reproduce makes it's life seem more precious to me. This is it, no second chance, no baby to take it's place, no chaos of family, just this life, just this hungry little kitten who purrs her way through every meal. Grateful for everything I give her, even with her belly in stitches.

More Damage caused by Hurricane Ivan

Even though that rat bastard didn't even hit here in Cancun there was some very serious damage done. Everyday the paper brings more stories of beaches stripped of sand or hotels now closed because of damage. Three kilometers of beach in Cancun are GONE! This stretch of beach used to be in the heart of the hotel zone.

I heard today that the Avalon Reef Hotel on the north eastern tip of Isla Mujeres is closed for repairs. It's right on the ocean and must have gotten quite a whipping by the waves. In Cancun the waves were supposedly 3 meters high, Isla Mujeres is even more exposed so they must have been horrendous.

Some beaches around here got bigger, the sans rearranging themselves. I heard that Playa del Carmen has beach damage, but that Puerto Morelos now has wider beaches. The northern side of the Cancun hotel zone now has more sand as well.

What's amazing to me is that the hurricane didn't hit us. What if it had?

Some Background

What's to know? I'm a mom, a web designer, a wife, a runner and a computer artist. I live in Cancun, Mexico with my husband, an old grumpy dog and many cats. I'm an American, hubby is Mexicano. Dog is American as are two of the cats. The rest of the cats are Mexigatos.

Why do we live here? We ask ourselves that sometimes. We chose Cancun because we didn't have enough information. Or maybe because it has the best economy in Mexico. Maybe because we thought that many folks here would speak English (some do but I wouldn't say "many"). Or maybe because it has that lovely Caribbean Sea out there. Truly, we chose Cancun because we were in a damn big hurry to decide where we were moving to.

I'll explain more in a later post.

Independance Day in Paradise

Yesterday, September 15, was the Mexican independance day. The day these folks celebrate kicking out those damn Spanish who had made them slaves for something like 300 years. There are parties and public gatherings all over the country. The highlight of the evening is El Grito, which means "the yell".

Last night we decided to go hear El Grito live as shouted by our much malingered mayor, Chacho. Viva Mexico! Viva Cancun! Viva Quintana Roo (our state)! They followed this with fireworks. Quite lame fireworks actually. And lots of singing and music.

The city is broke. Hopefully this is why they didn't waste gobs of money on fireworks. Chacho has been locked in some kind of political battle with the Governor of the state for some years now. Somehow or other the Governor has been able to put a stranglehold on the city's coffers. Now the richest city in all of Mexico, can't pay it's bills. We get 2 million visitors a year and we can't pay our bills?

Hurricane Ivan

Ivan the Unpredictable blew through the channel between us and the western tip of Cuba this week. The two of us had been checking the National Hurricane Center website regularly for days beforehand. They kept predicting that he would go north. First he was going to head north over Jamaica, then over the middle of Cuba, then over Havana. But Ivan kept coming west towards us. They evacuated parts of Florida days earlier. But by the time it was evident that he was coming close enough to bother us there was no time to prepare the city. We had less than 24 hours to prepare for the possibility that a Category 5 hurricane with 160 mph winds was going to hit near us.

The hurricane didn't hit. We barely got rain. We did get high winds and some of the beaches in Cancun are now much erroded. A pier on the north side is history and there is other damage too. But nothing like the devastation we could have had.

They never evacuated the hotels (all of which are ON the beach) because they had NOWHERE else to put 30,000 people. Not only is there nowhere to evacuate people TO, there's only one road out of the city going west. The nearest large town is to the west Valladolid which is a over 2 hours away and certainly cannot take in all the people who would need to leave Cancun.

In Jamaica the waves associated with Ivan were 2 stories high. What would happen to the over 100 beachside hotels in Cancun if 2 story waves driven by Category 5 force winds hit? Anyone in one of those buildings would have been in grave danger.

Now forget about the tourists for a minute. There were only 30,000 of them. What about the 700,000 residents of the city of Cancun? Many of them do not live in concrete buildings, they live in palapas, wooden buildings with palm leaf or corrugated tin roofs. Their houses would just blow away.

The city of Cancun narrowly missed having a major tragedy on it's hands this time. But what about next time?