The long true Cancun story of Hurricane Wilma with pics

[Adult Traffic]

First of all, I am back to work and it's business as usual so anyone that needs me I will try to get to you as soon as possible. I have a ton of work to catch up on as you can imagine and the best way to contact me is by my contact form . All traffic orders will get taken care of ASAP.

Of course, the traffic orders already running from http://adult-site-traffic.com was never affected as those servers are in California.

This is the factual account of our experiences during and directly after Hurricane Wilma, who pounded Cancun, Quintana Roo and Mexico’s Maya Riviera on the Yucatan Peninsula for 60 hours in October 2005. It was originally posted and published once on November 7th, 2005 but I wanted to share it even at this late date, so now that work is caught up I have time to post it.

Here is the (very long) Cancun Story.

Cancun City Pics

Cancun Hotel Zone Pics

Our House Pics

I don't know what the news is telling you in the US or other countries, we don't have cable back on yet to see US TV. Mexico President Vincent Fox is telling the people of Cancun that the hotel zone will be 85% occupied on December 15th, but from what I see that's not even remotely possible. Many of the hotels are gutted with electrical services and air ducts hanging out. There are virtually no beaches left in Cancun, just rocks up to the foundations of hotels with the ocean washing against the foundation. What used to be beach structures and swimming pools are gone. Some are floating out in the ocean. Millions of tons of sand is missing. The bottom has changed and where there used to be deep water is now sandbars. The hotel Aqua is a total loss and must come down as will many other hotels and buildings. Parking structures have collapsed. La Isla mall is about a 60% loss. If you have seen La Isla you know it's a huge mall with hundreds of outside shops and restaurants, one of the focal points of tourism and that was also were dolphin discovery/swim with dolphins was. Looking around Cancun and the Hotel Zone, complete businesses are just missing. Nothing is there but an empty lot, sometimes 2 or 3 walls.

Cancun is a City of 700,000 - 900,000 people depending on the time of year. Tourism is the only industry in Cancun and directly or indirectly supports 100% of the economy from the hotel gardeners to the surgeons at the hospitals. Walmarts (3), gas stations, supermarkets, department stores, street vendors, car stereo shops, hardware stores etc., etc., are all supported by tourism. Thousands and thousands of maids, bartenders, waiters and waitresses, pool boys, tour operators, convenience store employees and fast food workers (about half were destroyed) etc., etc., have no job. Many also have no house, no food, no car and no way to leave. For the first time here, I feel it prudent to carry weapons whether walking or driving. I no longer let my daughter just go off with her friends in a taxi. We take her to a specific destination and pick her up from the same. Cancun is a dangerous place to be right now and for the immediate future.

I went to bed Tuesday night before Wilma thinking we would stay here in the house for a cat 2 hurricane and I woke up Wednesday morning and saw that Wilma was officially the strongest storm ever observed. Thursday morning I put my wife and daughter in the car along with our computers and clothes and drove 4 hours to Merida across the Yucatan Peninsula where we set up my laptop and cell communications with our people in Cancun. The last pics we had were as the eye of the storm was over the island of Cozumel about the time they cut power to Cancun. As the winds picked up we lost communication with everyone in Cancun with a TelCel cellular phone as the towers were lost one by one. Most of our friends were in a downtown hotel which is managed by another friend and is also the backup shelter for the Ritz. A friend staying there had a MovieStar phone which stayed up for the entire storm and I was able to deposit $1,000 pesos on to her phone credit from Merida. We used that phone for weather updates back to the hotel management in Cancun. They were very afraid. The hotel was coming apart and some of the roof area was blowing away. They had water up to the service desk and the generators both failed as they were taken under water.

The main thing people wanted to know was what was happening. They could hear buildings being ripped up and they kept thinking it was going to be over. We were pinpoint tracking the storm and it's a pretty helpless feeling to hear how afraid they are and have to tell them that they haven't even seen the max winds yet. The storm was only moving between 2 and 4 miles per hour and they were pummeled for 60 hours. I wanted to make sure they knew they would have 6 to 7 hours of the eye and then they would get the backside of the storm. I was afraid that they thought that because of the long duration of the storm that the eye had missed them and when the eye actually hit that the storm was in fact over.

When the eye of the storm was over Punta Sam, in the area of our house, it was Sunday morning. I knew the storm would pull out fast as it left land so we had packed the car the night before and we left Merida at 7:00 am Sunday morning. We took the toll road for 2 hours and stopped at a gas station where there was a line of cars trying to get gas. We talked to an NBC crew who told us that the 'Cuota' (toll road) was under several feet of water near Cancun so we had to re-plan. Everyone was going to try to go through Valladolid, cross the jungle through Coba and catch the coastal highway near Tulum and smoke into Cancun on 4 lane roads. Well, as it takes 5 minutes or so to get gas, everyone got split up. We went to Valladolid and got headed about half way to Coba when we saw a police car sort of lounging on his hood talking to the drivers of a couple of vehicles. I decided to stop and check things out and found out that the road to Coba was under water. I'm sure a lot of vehicles that were going that way never slowed down to even ask what the conditions ahead were and wasted several hours of travel time.

(Later we found out that the NBC crew we talked to earlier at the gas was killed Sunday night in a wreck with their Ford Explorer. I guess they hit deep water at high speed, I didn't get a lot of details).

We turned around and headed back to Valladolid to take the road to Felipe Carrillo Puerto, down towards the area of Acapulco and the border of the country of Beliz. As we left Valladolid we were mixed in a convoy of well over 100 trucks from the Comission Federal Electrico which were staged in Valladolid waiting for the storm to clear and figure out which route to take. There were trucks from Acapulco, Merida, Veracruz, Monterrey and Mexico City etc. More military was also staged there and thousands of army units were already in place in Cancun before the storm. The navy was already in Cancun as Isla Mujeres (the island in front of our house) is their headquarters.

We arrived in Felipe Carrillo Puerto in late afternoon and figured it was our last place to get gas so we waited in line for about 45 minutes to fuel up. This was the first place we saw bus loads of tourists heading out, to where, I don't know but we were looking in better shape than they were. We left the gas station and took the coastal highway through Tulum and into Playa Del Carmen. Between Tulum and PDC is where we started seeing serious storm damage, although we had driven through jungle debris almost the whole day. Now there was the occasional tree in the road and power poles downed into the highway. Playa Del Carmen had a lot of damage, most buildings were damaged badly and the Sam's Club looked like it had collapsed. We didn't go look at the hotel zone. Power company trucks were already preparing to restore services. We headed out to Cancun as it was getting dark already on what should have been a 4 hour trip.

Continued...