Hurricane Carlotta Hits Puerto Escondido! Posted on June 20, 2012

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Hurricane Carlotta Hits Puerto Escondido!

Posted on June 20, 2012 | 2 Comments

Video from Hurricane @ Puerto

Hurricane Carlotta was very intense. Lots of damage was done to the community of Puerto Escondido and its neighbors. Everyone is slowly recovering. Federal Resources will be coming in shortly and in a few months we will be back up again.

If there’s anyone out there who’s able to support the community, please contact us for more information. The Puerto Escondido lifeguards are in need of help due to all damage cause by the hurricane. They used to have 8 towers along the beach at playa Zicatela and now there’s not a single one of them.

Here’s a video recap filmed during the storm and the aftermath.

Edwin Morales – www.moralesedwin.com

Surfline Report…

Hurricane Carlotta, the third named Pacific storm of the season, briefly saw Category 2 status on Friday before weakening to Cat 1 and plowing almost directly into Puerto Escondido on Friday night with 90mph+ winds.

Local photographer Edwin Morales was in Puerto as the storm hit. Here is his firsthand account:

For starters the whole population of Puerto and the towns nearby were definitely NOT ready for this. The authorities were saying on the local radio it was a tropical storm and not a Category 2 hurricane. So lots of people were not prepared for what we all felt.

I was tracking the storm for about two days before it hit us. A couple of hours before it started, I was able to warn my family and all of our friends. (People here generally don’t take things seriously and therefore, no one had the essentials.)

The storm started hitting us around 7pm with strong winds, about 50mph. The winds increased slowly until the eye of the storm was right on top of us and everything stopped. Lots of people thought it was over, but it was far from over.

That was around 8pm. As soon as the eye moved on, the winds finally came on strong, around 90mph, with gusts up to around 120mph. The darkness made things a lot worse, I think. No one could actually see what was going on.

Lots of houses lost their roofs and those inside had to run to find shelter somewhere else. I gave shelter to a family of 10 — all in one room, hiding till next morning. The windows were whistling like crazy. It was scary. Lots of windows split apart.

Winds lasted until 10pm, I think, and then the rain came. It was maybe not as strong as Hurricane Pauline in ’97, but some people think the winds were stronger this time due to the wind direction.

Only a little part of the harbor area has electricity as of Monday morning. Slowly, it’s getting fixed and power’s being turned on in other areas of town. The area by the Point still has no power or running water. I don’t even want to imagine how it is for the little communities far from here where the hurricane blasted them as well.

(Note: two children died when their house was taken by a mudslide nearby, and one 56-year-old woman passed away when the wind flipped her car.)

Saturday morning was really sad and awful to see all kinds of people who had lost everything the night before. Hundreds of trees had fallen all over the town. Dogs were running like crazy, as if they were wild dogs on the streets. All streets were still flooded. I can’t even imagine how they were when the rain was at its strongest point on Friday night.

Lifeguards were the first to evaluate all the damage by the beach. All eight towers were completely smashed. At the harbor, there was not a single boat in the water. All boats had to be taken out. Ironically, a restaurant called the Split Coconut was split in half by the only palm tree that fell down in the entire area.

Now there’s been lots of helicopters flying the area trying to evaluate all damage in the region and federal resources should be coming in shortly. I feel really bad for the people that lost everything.

The last big hurricane to make landfall here was Pauline in 1997, with winds of 109 mph, killing at least 230 people along the Pacific coast.

Luckily, other surf areas in southern Mexico fared better than Puerto. “In Salina Cruz, so far everything is good,” says local surf tour operator Cesar Ramierez. “Lots of rain for five hours on Friday and showers on Saturday and Sunday, but everything is OK.”

Hurricane Carlotta strikes with awesome power By Tony Richards on 16 June, 2012

Hurricane Carlotta strikes with awesome power

By Tony Richards on 16 June, 2012

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The twisted remains of the roof of the secondary school near Puerto Angelito

In the wake of a hurricane that left few people unawed by the incredible power that nature can wield, Puerto Escondido awoke this morning to begin cleaning up. Hurricane Carlotta struck with fury about 7:30 pm Friday evening, intensifying over the next hour before settling into a terrifying onslaught of steady winds approaching 200 km/h.
The city hunkered down: there was no other choice. To venture outside was to invite serious injury or death. In Zicatela, hotel owner Dan Clemens reported pieces of lamina roofing striking his building with the force of small and deadly rockets. Clemens said storm damage was major and all his palapa roofs had been destroyed. Indeed, palaperos will be kept busy for some time.
But apart from the damage caused by hundreds, if not thousands, of uprooted or sheared-off trees and limbs, and some roads eaten away in places by heavy runoff, the city escaped lightly considering the deadly force with which Carlotta attacked. There were no deaths here, though two children died in Pluma Hidalgo. However, the roughly-built homes with makeshift roofs of tin suffered the most. Some were utterly destroyed, many others severely damaged.
One notable scene today was the front of Super Che. One of the huge windows that looks out over the ocean was gone; the others had been extensively taped to keep them intact.
The storm brought heavy rain, which continued to fall the rest of the night. But the rain didn't come in the quantities forecast, and the wind didn't rage as long as might have been expected. At its worst the onslaught lasted not much more than half an hour, but during the two hours leading up to the peak the wind was still strong enough, and steady enough, to put fear in the heart of any man.
It was that unrelenting pounding that Dan Clemens, who was here for Paulina in 1997, described as a major difference between the two storms. That and the rain: Paulina, which was the last hurricane to strike Puerto Escondido, brought huge rainfall. There was comparatively little last night.
And the whole thing was pretty well over by about 10:30, when the storm made landfall just northwest of Puerto and the Level 2 Hurricane was soon downgraded to a tropical storm.
Today there is a light drizzle falling as residents of the city are busy with the massive clean-up. They were at it first thing this morning, and in a fashion typical of the atitutude and outlook of local citizens, quick to joke with their neighbors as they set about their work. Much of the city is still without power this afternoon, but that hasn't stopped some businesses from opening. Cafecito in Rinconada was serving breakfasts to a typically large crowd, despite the lack of electricity.
Meanwhile, the sun will come out shortly and life in Puerto Escondido goes on.

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