Dean's Wrath Spares Yucatan

By ADRIANA VARILLAS and MANUEL ROIG-FRANZIA The Washington Post

Published: Aug 22, 2007

FELIPE - CARRILLO PUERTO, Mexico - In the grim darkness, as 160 mph winds lashed this small city, she lay in pain.

The electricity had long since gone out. Doors were stitched tight. The streets were bare.

But Angelica Tun Puc was awake in a powerless hospital here in the Yucatan Peninsula. She was fighting through labor pains that began the night before the arrival of Dean, the most powerful hurricane to strike land since Andrew struck South Florida. Dean also was the third most intense Atlantic basin hurricane to reach land in history.

Sometime before 9 a.m. Tuesday, while rain pelted windows secured only by crosses made of tape, Tun Puc gave birth to a tiny, wriggling baby girl, said her doctor, Basilio Eliseo Ku Euan. Tun Puc showed off her hurricane-day newborn for a small group of reporters and some of the police officers who rushed her to the hospital after finding her close to giving birth in a remote village.

Exhausted, she could utter only one sentence for her guests as she held her daughter tightly to her chest: "I haven't even thought what I'm going to name her."

Translated literally, the Spanish phrase for giving birth means "to give to the light."

And not long after Tun Puc became a mother, the sun appeared for the first time, revealing a city that was far less damaged than expected.

The birth was a small blessing on a day of huge blessings here. The storm that the Mexican news media had dubbed "El Gigante" - the giant - somehow found the one route through the Yucatan Peninsula that would cause the least damage, slipping well south of Cancun's glitzy hotels and thick residential neighborhoods. Trees fell, glass cracked, but there was none of the widespread, catastrophic wreckage that a storm this huge was capable of sowing.

Though Dean killed 13 people during three days in the Caribbean, by late Tuesday - despite earnest searches by police and soldiers - not a single death had been recorded in Mexico.

However, driving rain, poor communications and impassable roads made it difficult to determine how isolated Mayan communities fared in the sparsely populated jungle.

50,000 Tourists Evacuated

While 50,000 tourists were safely evacuated from resorts on the Yucatan Peninsula, many poor Indians closer to Dean's direct path refused military orders to leave their homes, said Gen. Alfonso Garcia, who was running shelters in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 60 miles northwest of Majahual.

Troops evacuated more than 250 small communities, and 8,000 people took refuge in 500 shelters, said Jorge Acevedo, a Quintana Roo state spokesman. Others turned away soldiers with machetes and refused to leave, but some of them changed their minds when the winds and rain intensified, he said.

Little was known about the thousands who rode out the storm in low-lying huts.

Many villagers fled to secret caves that, Mayan lore says, are immune to hurricanes and floods. Others declared that "God had designated that they not leave," said Ligia Arana, a legislator from Quintana Roo in the eastern Yucatan, adding, "'If we're going to die, that is a matter for our God.'"

Dean, weakened over land, is forecast to regain strength as it passes over the Gulf of Campeche and onto Mexico's mainland today. The storm is expected to deliver winds in excess of 100 mph somewhere between Tampico and Veracruz, two of Mexico's most important port cities. It is expected to pass through Mexico's richest offshore oil fields and could veer close to the aging Laguna Verde nuclear plant. Hundreds of buses have been placed on alert in the event of radiation leaks.

"Here in Veracruz, we're blessed by God," Jorge Ortiz, a retired airline worker, said Tuesday. "They always say the storms are going to get us, but we are always safe."

Ortiz was buoyed by reports from the Yucatan, as were his friends and neighbors, who seemed to do little to prepare for the storm. Restaurant workers watched television and cheered.

"It's down to a Category 1!" Gabriel Canales yelled at his El Varadero seafood restaurant.

Dean made landfall at 4:30 a.m. in Costa Maya, a cruise ship port near Chetumal, a city close to the Belize border that received some of the worst street flooding and building damage in the area.

U.S. National Hurricane Center officials said Dean registered the third lowest pressure at landfall - a measure of its intensity - ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, trailing only Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 and an unnamed storm in 1935.

Dean was the first Category 5 storm to make landfall in the Atlantic basin since Andrew, which devastated towns south of Miami in 1992. Andrew caused $26 billion in damage, equivalent to about $38 billion now. Damage estimates for Dean range from $750,000 to $3 billion in the Caribbean. AIR Worldwide, a risk management firm, estimated insured losses in Mexico are unlikely to exceed $400 million.

Oil Rigs Shut Down

The threat posed by the storm was enough to send shivers across Mexico.

The huge, government-owned oil platforms off the Yucatan's western peninsula were shut down before Dean's arrival, sapping Mexico of revenue from 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day.

More than 40,000 tourists fled resorts in Cancun, Playa del Carmen and other Mayan Riviera cities. President Felipe Calderon cut short a summit in Quebec with President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to tour hurricane zones.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report