After the Hurricane

Have you ever woken up on a strange place which definitely wasn't your bed? And then you found out it was actually a bathroom floor? I hadn't, this was very new experience for me. I don't know what you do in this situation after a party night. But the first thing you do after the hurricane night is going to look out of the window. The curiosity is great, so you don't even mind standing barefoot in the paddle of water and the pieces of leaves stuck on the windows blocking your view (in fact, you are lucky that the window is still holding together and you are not standing in the broken glass.). The next thing you need to do is letting your family know that you are alive and absolutely fine (have never experienced anything like hurricane, they can't even imagine it, so they'll appreciate to hear from you). We have no electricity, but the phone service works now and then, so luckily the message is finally sent before we lost service completely. Next few days we are going to be without any contact with the outside world.

The morning is peaceful and calm – how relative everything is! Two days ago I wouldn't have called this peaceful and calm: the trees bent in the direction of the wind, the sky is dark and the clouds moving so fast... But people in La Paz are not moving anywhere. They are staying in their warm (which is not really different from outside) and dry (well, not all of them) houses and knowing there is going to be a lot of work needed to be done during the next days...

One of our jobs while staying at Jonn's place is to keep his yard nice and clean. Which is going to require more time and energy than we originally thought. Our first task is to clear the way out, we are trapped here. One of the two big trees on Jonn's property, yucca tree, which used to be a home for birds, reptiles and insects and Jonn's favorite plant, broke (that explains one of the “boom” we heard last night). Now the fallen trunk is blocking our exit. The shape of metal railing and big plastic box were changed under the weight of the trunk. The ground is covered with leaves, broken twigs and branches, some of the plants are completely “bald” now. Broken flowerpots to be found and the harvest of tomatoes and peppers will be smaller than Jonn had expected. Two big shading tarps are ripped of and laying tangled on the ground. Pieces of broken cinder blocks and things blown from the whole property are laying on a pile, it's just a mess. But it looks like we have no damage except of those two tarps and the tree. Even the barbecue grill which tried to fly last night, seems to be ok.

In the evening we went for a walk to see what had happened in the town. First we had to truckle the fallen electric wire, right in front of our gate. Looks like we won't have electricity for a while. The greatest damage is done on trees, some streets are blocked with fallen trees and broken branches. Some parts of the downtown are little flooded. While crossing them we try not to think about the fact, that it's not only the rainwater coming from the full sewage canals... There are some fallen lamps - looking closer we can see that it's because of “mexican style” of attaching them to the ground – the screw is smaller than a hole where it's supposed to hold. All the restaurants are closed, sunshades and umbrellas are torn in pieces. The tape is apparently favorite window-protecting tool and seems to be working really well – only few windows, all of them without tape, are broken. Heavy metal cross fell from the church roof, it is arrow-shaped now. Metal sheets are bent, wooden boards blown down, signs and billboards blown away, some metal constructions ended up in pile of bent metal sticks and sheets. But overall we are well surprised, we were expecting more damage. A few days of cleaning and everything will be back to normal...

Cleaning and sweeping is our main job during the next days. Martin proved to be good “liberator”, he cut across the fallen tree and knew how to open and close the electric garage gate without the “magic button” which usually does the trick. Our dinners are rich – there is a lot of food in the freezer which has to be eaten (even though we tried hard, we couldn't eat everything in time and had to throw some food away anyway) and romantic – with the candlelight. Having nice view of La Paz, every night we watch another part of the city having the light again, and every night we hope that it will be our turn tomorrow... It's too hot inside without the air-condition, so we sleep on the porch, what is greatly appreciated by mosquitos, whose annoying “bzzzzzzzzzzzzz” is our “music” all night...

The fifth day after the hurricane, Maria went to CFE (electric company) office to ask them when we would have the power again. “Nobody knows, but thank you for letting us know about your problem” was the answer. Two days later she was there again and she was told that they couldn't have repaired it yet, because nobody had told them that we still didn't have power.

The eight day after the hurricane, electricians were working close by our house. Maria went to ask them if they would fix our problem. They said they'd had no idea we were still without power, because nobody had told them that... But since they were already here, they were going to look at it. So it happened we ate our dinner not with the twinkling candlelight, but with the blinking light of our lamps. We have power, but it's unstable and anything else but light turns it off. No fridge, neither air-condition yet. And as we found out later – the wire hanging about 5 feet above the ground, is under the high voltage, the safety standards are not met yet. Not sooner than three days later, after Jonn arrived, we finally have the full and safe power.

Based on our view – we were the first ones without power and the last ones with it. But it's still not that bad, some households were even without water. Each house has it's own water tank on the roof, which is filled by pump. The problem is that the pumps run on electric power. Therefore those people whose tank wasn't big and full enough lack water now. Some tanks were even blown down from the roofs. One our friend told us her story, how she wanted to go out during the hurricane, but her family convinced her it wasn't a good idea. Just at that moment the big tank fell from the roof, exactly at the same place where she would have been standing... (By the way: in 2001 she lived in New York and worked in the building of World Trade Center. On September 11^th she had a stomach ache, so she didn't go to work... Somebody has a good guardian angel :-)).

A week after the hurricane we visited Todos Santos – the village 50 miles southwest of La Paz, visited much by tourists for its nice atmosphere and typical art shops and galleries. Nothing like that to be found there now. Instead of tourists walking on the streets, local people cleaning fallen trees, broken branches, pieces of glass and bricks and other hurricane mess. Everything is closed except for Hotel California (do you know the song by Eagles? This is the hotel they sing about), because it's powered by their own generator. Based on what we have seen on the way here – all the broken electric poles (like they were just stalks of straw instead of concrete) and torn wires – we estimate they are not going to have power until Christmas! We saw many CFE cars and poor electricians who look like they have no idea where to start with repairing of all that damage. We feel sorry for them and don't blame them anymore that we have been without power for so long...

All the road signs along the highway are bent and folded like they were made of paper. That made me to start calling them “origami signs” :-). And now we see what we were taught in ecology classes: the local plants are well adapted to the local conditions, as opposed to the introduced ones: most of the palm trees survived, cacti seem to be without any damage, but big eucalyptus trees are uprooted...

On our way back we have to go through the military control. All the cars coming from Los Cabos are checked, the electric appliances or suspiciously big amount of beer is what the soldiers look for. Los Cabos got the strongest wind and therefore there was the most damage. The airport, sport stadium, some hotels and shopping centers were ruined. But even more damage than by hurricane was made by people. The stores are closed, there is no power, and even the ATM doesn't want to work without the electricity... But the family is hungry, where to get food? Of course, in the store. Is it closed? No problem, it's easy to break in without those annoying alarms... Seeing there is no way to stop it, police decided to control it: everybody can go in once and take what they can carry in their hands. The idea wasn't bad, just one detail ruined it: there are too many customers and too few policemen. The situation got out of hands of policemen soon, more than one store were emptied by well organized groups of “carriers” and “car loaders”. The first taken things were beer and TVs. In some parts of the city, houses were robbed too.

There was no robbing in La Paz, but some panic happened here as well. Gasoline, drinking water, candles and batteries were lacking soon. And guess what the first missing goods in grocery stores were – candy and canned soups.

Non-working infrastructure = no tourists = problem (this area depends on tourism). Mexicans showed that they can work hard and quickly if they want to. Workers, especially electricians, from whole Mexico came to help. The airport “rose from the ashes” and it's functioning again. Tourists are coming back. La Paz almost looks like there has never been any hurricane. In Los Cabos, however, you can see that Odile wasn't much fun here – ruined hotels (some of them were built of dry wall, which I think is not exactly the right hurricane-resistant material...), fallen billboards and signs and many missing trees is what you still can see there.

And one more “gift” Odile and rainy season left for us – clouds of hungry mosquitos! Local mosquitos saw your ears (metaphorically) and suck your blood (literally) and on a top of that some of them transmit Dengue. Dengue is an endemic virus in Carribean area and some parts of Asia. Symptoms are: high fever, strong headache, muscle and bones ache, digestive problems, rash. It usually takes about two weeks, some days you feel better and the next day it comes back. There is no pill for it, you just have to wait till your body wins the fight. The good news is, after that you have at least one year immunity. And you won't die of dengue unless you are baby, too old or too ill. There was the epidemic of Dengue in La Paz and a few dengue cases were found in Cabo Pulmo as well. Martin got it too, so it's another new experience for him. Dengue is also called “break-bone disease”, because during the first days of dengue you feel like all the bones in your body are broken. Luckily Martin had this phase only for two days and then he was just exhausted for the next two weeks (which is also typical for dengue). Martin is back to normal and healthy again now and he doesn't need every-day-a-few-hours-nap anymore.

Jonn and Maria got dengue too, which changed the plans. They didn't fly to Mexico city and therefore we weren't needed in La Paz for house and dog sitting. We finished our projects in Cabo Pulmo (the cob oven and bench made for Gordon). We met our good friends Sally and Wilkie and their son Luke, who returned from Colorado on November 1^st. And during rainy and cold (not really, but it's below 75 °F, which is cold for here :-)) day - caused by another hurricane, unusually late, but this time land-friendly one – we got a ride to La Paz with Wilkie and Luke, who had a dentist appointment there (in Mexico it's about ten times cheaper than in USA). We said good bye to Cabo Pulmo – the place we had come to visit for a weekend and ended up staying here for nine months.

P.S.: So we found out that Odile is female name. The destructive hurricanes usually have female names (for example Katrina). I don't know who and how decides the names for hurricanes, the only rule I know is that the names of hurricanes in one season are in alphabetic order (there was hurricane Maria and then Norbert before Odile). And for some reason the “female hurricanes” are usually more destructive ones. But every rule has an exception – the most destructive hurricane for Cabo Pulmo, in 2006, was called John.