Hurricane Season in Guatemala
Posted on August 21, 2007 - Filed Under Personal, Simple Life |
Guatemala is in the enviable position of being right in the edge of the hurricane zone. You know, all those ones that slide up past Mexico, causing chaos and wreaking havoc and then move on to the U.S. So, right now, we just caught the tail of Tropical Storm Erin and now Hurricane Dean is coming through.
We are pretty sheltered here, with volcanoes on three sides, but we still get some heavy wind and a LOT of rain. Which is really bad for drying clothes and it tends to whip the tin roof sheets off the house, but hey, we don´t usually die from things like this. So, right now, we are battening down the hatches for hurricane season as Dean moves in.
When Hurricane Stan went through here, it didn´t just graze us, it hit parts of Guatemala that are thankfully mostly jungle. But people died because of the deluge of rain. I was working in an elementary school a couple of towns over and pregnant with Dorian. There was no school for a week because of flooding and when we finally came back, only half the students returned. And one of the teachers had vanished. Someone went to see if he was ok and discovered that his house had been swept away by the rising river. It was scary, even though he was later found to be alright, just stuck at his grandparent´s home.
It was nearly impossible to get through the town at that point, the river had cut it in half and was eating away at the edges, dropping houses, schools and everything into the muddy water. Something like 75% of bridges in Guatemala were washed away, leaving entire towns stranded and without food or shelter. Families drowned in their cars or houses, children were swept away in the overflowing rivers and animals drowned by the dozens.
In one part of the country, an entire town was erased from the face of the earth in a massive landslide caused by the never-ending rain. I don´t remember exact numbers, but something like 800 people, entire families, were killed. A year later, they finished digging out the remains.
While it was a very frightening and sad time for Guatemala, it was amazing how people pulled together. Foreigners and locals alike had food drives and gathered clothing and furniture for the families that had lost everything. Churches offered their space to anyone who needed shelter and later on to host schools.
People trudged through thigh-deep mud to rescue trapped families and bring them safe drinking water and food. It was truly astounding. This country is poor. The majority of people live WAY below the poverty line, but everyone pulled together and helped one another out, whether that meant giving a mother milk for her one surviving child, or helping a family dig out the bodies of their grandparents from mud-filled homes.
That disaster is nearly two years behind us, but every hurricane season brings fears that it will happen again. I find it especially scary, because in Canada, we never worried about hurricanes or earthquakes and here, they are part of every yearly cycle!
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3 Responses to “Hurricane Season in Guatemala”
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Hey, I hope that you all survive the ’season’ as it is said so often, without much (if any) damage…
We don’t have that sort of thing here in Sydney, the occasional East Coast Low bring a lot of rain to the East Coast of Australia (Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne).
Take care my friend…
I hope it all passes by you guys. We could use the rain we usually get as a side effect of the tropical storms/hurricanes, but I hope a nice heavy rain is all anyone gets!
Well, it is pouring right now, but we are ok. Any floodwaters will run right down the volcano, so we are pretty safe in that regard! One of the advantages of living on a 45º incline.