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?