Punto Chivato and Mulege after Hurricane Jimena

Yesterday Esperando and I drove to Punto Chivato to meet up with Jack McCormick of Baja Bush Pilots who is organizing an airlift of clothing, medicines and other items to be brought in for needy residents of Mulege and Santa Rosalia. He had done a fly over of the peninsula for the last several days and thought that from the air these communities seemed the hardest hit and had the least access to goods and services.

The road into Punto Chivato doesn’t exist anymore in a recognizable form; it has been completely washed out. People are getting in and out to the highway in 4x4s. The arroyos brought so much water through that the road has been replaced with boulders, cactus and sand. The new road, a bare discernable track established by the first brave people who decided to leave after the storm, winds around obstacles, goes up and down and is very jarring to drive on. It took us two hours to drive to Punto Chivato; it used to take an hour. When we got to Punto Chivato the landscape appeared untouched. Some of the homes had damage, but much of it wasn’t discernable from the road. We off-loaded about 50 baby kits from Jack’s plane that were provided by the Red Cross. Jack has a container load of care packages that Walmart has donated which consist of food enough for a family of four for a week: beans, rice and oil.

Next we drove Jack north up the highway to see if the Palo Verde airport (40 minutes from Santa Rosalia) would be accessible for his airlift. From the air the taxiway looks good, but access from the highway has washed away leaving a riverbed of boulders in its wake. Driving up and down the highway one observes the many downed power poles and ripped out piping for Santa Rosalia’s water system and the electrical feed to Mulege. It will take a massive effort to restore these, it won’t be anytime soon. In the meantime we noticed a lot of potable water treatment units arriving in town delivered by the water company and electrical generators by the electric company. These Mexican agencies are responding extremely well to this crisis and deserve 5 gold stars.

We turned back around to take Jack south to see what the airport was like in Mulege at Don Johnson’s La Serenidad Hotel. When he flew over it looked like a lot of water was standing there. Mulege is in a shambles, mud and water flooded the downtown and went through many of the homes that were not up on the hillsides. The bridge was broached by 2-3 meters of water at the high point. Lots of downed palm trees. The Oasis and Orchard housing developments and the Mexican homes on the opposite side of the river are pretty much devastated and the road along side the river to them has washed out. It makes me sick.

The Serenidad had major water and mud damage and they were slopping it out, using water from the swimming pool to help wash away the mud. The runway that from the air looked wet was actually covered with a fine layer of whitish sand that had appeared to be water. In fact with a little grading the runway should be fine and should be dried enough in a day or two; Jack was hopeful he could land there with his squad of angels in airplanes.

We drove back to Santa Rosalia and showed Jack how badly it had fared. We invited him to stay for dinner, but he was eager to get back to his plane where all of his clothes and ditty bag were. So Esperando loaned him one of the mine’s 4x4 trucks so he would have ground transportation back to the plane, and then back to Mulege so he could start organizing his airlift operations. Tomorrow we are flying back to the US for 10 days. We will be one less set of people eating up the food and drinking the water that others are needing now.

Hurricane Jimena

Highway approaches to Santa Rosalia north (top) and south (bottom three)

Hurricane Jimena has left a mess of Santa Rosalia. Both north and south Highway 1 approaches have lost big chunks to make driving all but impossible for anything but a 4X4. Downtown is still paralyzed with heavy mud. Electrical crews are working hard and electricity is slowly coming back on in town, no running water though. Baja Bush Pilots is supporting the Mexican Red Cross in trying to organize relief efforts.

The storm entered as a Category 1 Hurricane, sat on top of us for 10 hours, went away for 8 hours and has now returned as a Tropical Depression, a fairly steady downpour moving slowly at 6 mph. This is a pretty soggy place right now. We have been told by locals that this is the worst storm in 50 years.

San Ignacio gets its power from Santa Rosalia and so is also probably still without power.

The following excerpts of correspondence to jack@bajabushpilots.com is quoted:

“My name is Rosalva Rocha Cuesta. I was born and raised in Mulege, Baja California Sur. This morning I had the fortune to speak with my sister in Mulege. She related to me the devastation left behind by Hurricane Jimena. The trail of damage left by H. Jimena is far worse that H. John back in 2006. The water level was much higher(apparently 2meters over the bridge in town), than of H. John´s. Without going into further detail, I am sure you get the picture. The only store in town open for business is "´El Pinguino" near the kindergarten area. Most of the supermarkets in town had major flood problem damaging their goods and were left unable to provide for the Muleginos in ne! ed. La tienda "El Pinguino", was running out of everything this morning already. . . I am sending this message to you requesting your help for my people in Mulege. Muleginos have no way to reach out at this point, but they are in desperate need of water and food.”

“Hello Joe Diorio here at Chivato. PCH runway was in good shape until it started raining again this AM. Will need a couple of days to dry when the sun comes out.... Latest from Palo Verde / San Bruno/ Chivato Bay... what ever you want to call it. It´s unusable. large boulders and river ran through the middle of it. Hotel Serenidad (in Mulege) under water .... so we should have our (Punto Chivato) road graded to the highway as soon as the sun comes out and I´ve heard that the road from Palo Verde to Mulege is passable.... maybe air lift to here and run in with trucks??? Let me know if i can help from here. Will walk runway as soon as rain stops...”

People concerned about Punto Chivato should check out http://bajaquest.com/jimena/ which has photos of many of the homes there.

And from Dave Perry “Jack, I just talked to Loreto, there is no electricity, which they guess won´t be connected for 10 days to two weeks. No water anywhere in town for 4 days. All food sold out of markets, gas station running on a generator-lines over 1/2 mile, night and day.” Reports from a local resident employee in Loreto state that there 50 high voltage power lines down between Cuidad Constitucion (where Loreto power comes from) to Loreto.

A Day at the Beach

Yesterday Esperando and I spent exploring the beaches at Punto Chivato. Clever Esperando went to Google Earth to look for a beach that someone had told him about north of where we usually go. From Google Earth he could pretty much tell what road to take to get us there—thank you Google Earth! The road was windy and rocky, and it’s a good thing we had 4-wheel drive. At the beach, the waves were wild and wind driven. The sight of the raw power of the ocean was awesome. We thought the storm might have washed stuff in, and we did see lots of dead puffer fish. This beach is has rocks and shell fragments instead of sand, but interestingly these have all been worn to smooth ovals with the heavy action of the surf. So you have these beautiful polished fragments of rock and shell collected in large masses to rake through. I call this beach Rock Beach.

We spent about an hour walking around and taking pictures, then went back up over the hill to the beach we know that I call Sandy Beach near the Italian hotel, Posada de las Flores. This beach has very fine pale grey sand and some nice shells. The storm had wiped the beach clean as a slate. This beach is on a kind of mini peninsula, and it became apparent that the surf had washed over the entire little peninsula during the hurricane. All the shells had been washed to the other side of the peninsula and were strewn across the sand by the tide. Lots of them were older worn out shells that must have been submerged for some period of time as they were green or grey and not very attractive. We had our lunch there as the ocean was much calmer on this side.

We thought about going home then, but I remembered there was supposed to be a great shell beach on the southwest end of the development, so we set off in that direction to see what was at the other end. We found the last house in the development and took the road to it. As I have said previously this community is the kind of place people come to stay for about 1 month each year, so here are all these nice homes sitting around empty. Its kind of sad. Anyway, we drove down to the beach and got out to explore another fine beach. This one had lava flows and potential tide pools on the left side and a beautiful sandy beach COVERED with shells on the right side. I picked up about 10 perfect murex shells, a fragile and intact pinshell, and some I don’t know. It was a pretty incredible event—nothing like going shopping for free!

We finally decided to head for home and got back on the highway; it was then we saw how strong the wind was and how churned up the sea was for it. Hugh white caps topped the very dark blue water. The wind has continued all night and the temperature has dropped dramatically—it was 70F as a low last night and we could sleep comfortably without air conditioning or fan! Apparently this is normal fall weather here. Today it is even more windy if that is possible, and fine dust is filtering into the house through windows and the doors. Ugh!

Surfing with the cardons

Monday has returned as it always does and the Texican has taken off to Vancouver. Oh woe, sad me—abandoned! Just one house guest, I hope we don’t get tired of each other.

Yesterday Esperando and I had a fine day at the beach at Punto Chivato, a gringo colony of about 50 nice vacation homes on a secluded beach south of here set back from the highway. We had looked at it when we first arrived as a possible place to live. The Architect who remodeled Casa Boleo has built quite a few homes there and gave us a tour of one of them back then; that is how we ended up having him remodel Casa Boleo. We thought about getting a house there facing the beach, but the houses are really close to the surf and we were worried the house might get wiped out in a bad storm. Also it is only seasonally occupied and I didn’t much like being so isolated when Esperando was at work.

The drive there normally takes 45 minutes, but it took us about an hour because the dirt road was badly washed out from the effects of Julio. Picture this: we are driving along the road thick on both sides with cardons (big cactuses that look like saguaros). We can’t go very fast as the road is really rough. All of a sudden 50 vultures perched on top of the cardons in front of us spread their wings to sun simultaneously. It was quite a sight, but the photographer was too slow to capture it.

There is a very upscale Italian hotel there (the owner is Italian and the hotel caters to Italians) which we thought to have a look at, but the owner greeted us as we drove in and told us it had closed for the season and wouldn’t open for another 6 weeks. He told us where to find the beaches. They were very nice small beaches with soft fine sand and pleasantly warm water. The dog went with us, he got quite worried when I started wading out to sea. When I got out far enough to squat down and be totally submersed, it was too much for him and he started out to save me. He doesn’t like getting wet as a Lab would, so I stood up to show him I was safe, and he turned back around and went to the beach.

One of the interesting sights was the cardons that had been uprooted and washed onto the beach from the storm and were rolling around in the surf. Instead of your usual driftwood there was cactus driftwood, something a bit different.