John soaks Baja, then weakens
CABO SAN LUCAS, Mexico – Tropical Storm John threatened to cause flash floods and mudslides Sunday as it passed over Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, drenching local fishing villages and American vacationers after throwing a scare at the luxury resorts of Los Cabos.
President Vicente Fox on Sunday planned to tour La Paz, a city of more than 150,000 people where the storm knocked down trees, sent billboards flying and cut electricity.
John was a Category 2 hurricane with winds of 110 mph when it hit the southern tip of the peninsula late Friday, but officials reported no deaths and relatively little major damage, though some shantytown shacks were blown down.
By Sunday, the storm was hurling rain on the normally arid Baja, threatening to cause flash floods. The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said up to 8 inches of rain were expected, with up to 18 inches possible in some areas. John was downgraded to a tropical depression later in the day.
The storm had maximum sustained winds of 45 mph and was located about 20 miles southwest of the ancient mining town of Santa Rosalia early Sunday after slogging past Loreto, which is being developed as a massive resort aimed at U.S. visitors and retirees.
Forecasters said it would move out to sea south of Tijuana, but the storm also was expected to bring heavy rains to Southern California and Arizona.
The airport serving Los Cabos reopened Saturday, and lines of tourists formed to catch flights out of the still largely shuttered beach towns, their vacations spoiled. The airport was closed Thursday night. “We planned on six days of sport fishing, and we got one,” said Dave Rhode of Santa Barbara, Calif., who had his boat taken out of the water Thursday as the hurricane neared.
Asked if he would return to this normally sun-dappled coast, Rhode answered, “We always come back.”
While hotels in Cabo San Lucas mopped up puddles of water in their marble-floored lobbies, the poorest residents of Cabo San Lucas – hotel employees or construction workers who at best earn $20 per day – surveyed the damage to their fragile shacks in nearby shantytowns.
“I lost the roof of my house,” said construction worker Jose Manuel Payen Fabela, 46, referring to his two-room tarpaper shack in a squatters camp known as Tierra y Libertad.
Payen spent Friday night with his eight children and 19 other people on thin foam pads in a small government-run emergency shelter.
The storm was a varying experience for tourists taking shelter in marble-lobbied hotels and members of the local population who build and staff them.
“They had an open bar and a little DJ come in,” said Tim Anderson, a highway administration employee from Alamosa, Colo., who waited out the hurricane in a hotel in San Jose del Cabo.
But Ruben Moreno, 32, a bricklayer, saw the hurricane from a different perspective, huddled in his shack made of tarpaper, tin and plastic tarps in one of Cabo San Lucas’ shantytowns.
“The wind came through hard, early in the morning,” said Moreno, who defied evacuation orders and waited out the hurricane at his home.
Nearby, a stream of water had coursed through the camp, piling mud and sand in its wake. At least two of his neighbors’ jury-rigged, wood-frame shacks had collapsed, leaving a mix of plastic sheeting, tarpaper and blankets in the sand.