# Hurricanes In Perspective



## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

The two Tropical Storms/Hurricanes as redefined from time-to-time barreling through Mexico and later Lake Chapala as pussycats and delivering much needed rain to serve marginally in helping the lake (sump, actually) become a larger repository of toxic chemicals and human and other animal wastes and, as this event transpired, I read a post on another forum specializing in llife at Lake Chapala that at least one local expat living in the large expat colonies on the lake hoped for "buckets or rain" to" replenish" the lake as a result of the unusual convergence of two tropical storms descending (much diminished and no longer dangerous) on Lake Chapala at the same time and I was reminded of the old weather reports I used to watch while resident on the Gulf Coast of Alabama where weather reporters thanked God hurricanes veered south into Mexico thus sparing Texas as if there were no human beings and other of God´s creatures living south of that artificial border who might be devastated by such tropical disturbances and here were countless people in places such as Veracruz and Guerrero and Oaxaca who, at best, lost their homes and, at worst their lives and were destined to live in misery for weeks or months because of these natural phenomena and we at Lake Chapala praise the lord for two more centimeters of polluted water in a sump. 

We, in Alabama, were always pleased when the hurricanes landed east along the Florida Panhandle or west alng the Mississippi Coast but those Godless heathens deserved it.


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## diablita (May 7, 2010)

I guess I could be considered a godless heathen because I'm an atheist. I also live a few miles outside of Acapulco. Been here for 16 years and have survived Paulina and now Manuel. For me Paulina was worse for me because my ground floor apt. had a couple of inches of water in it. I learned from that one, fixed the drainage problem and Manuel only gave me a couple of leaks in the ceiling. Luckily I'm on higher ground than the unfortunate thousands who have suffered catastrophic damage to the little they own. The local paper said that we will probably be without water for about 10 days. I am grateful that I have electricity because many do not and I am grateful that all of my friends in the area are OK as well. This morning we have blue skies and sun even though the forecast called for more rain. Things will be soon back to normal for me but for many it will take months or years to recover. Yesterday, the president, Peña Nieto was here and promised swift and sweeping aid. I hope he follows through. Such is life.


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

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diablita said:



I guess I could be considered a godless heathen because I'm an atheist. I also live a few miles outside of Acapulco. Been here for 16 years and have survived Paulina and now Manuel. For me Paulina was worse for me because my ground floor apt. had a couple of inches of water in it....

Click to expand...

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diablita said:


> You´re doing better than we are. We are also godless heathens, I being a failed Alabama Presbyterian and my wife being a French Catholic (which the Chiapas protestant fundamentalist indigenous folk, correctly, do not consider to be religiously oriented) and the honeymoon cottage in which we spent the first two years of our marriage (1971 &72) on the western shore of Mobile Bay just a few miles north of Dauphin Island on the Gulf of Mexico has been consigned to history by Hurricane Frederick which blew through Mobile in 1979 and blew our original marital home to hell reducing it to less than rubble so thank God we moved to San Francisco in 1973.
> 
> By the way ; a little known fact. Dauphin Island was the original capital of French Louisiana dating back to the 16th Century but the capital was moved to an area now approximating New Orleans after a hurricane and disease decimated the Dauphin Island colony and nearby French colonial settlements. This was before air conditioning and CNN. That honeymoon cottage of ours was located next to Mon Luis Island on the Fowl River as it flows into Mobile Bay. A fine and beautiful place if a bit humid.


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## Justina (Jan 25, 2013)

And perhaps if speculators stopped insisting on building homes where before the water could flow naturally. Tabasco was a case in point some years ago where housing had been built where it shouldn't, with no respect to the inclination or rather natural flow in times of heavy weather.


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## lagoloo (Apr 12, 2011)

There's something very seductive about the most dangerous situations: clinging to mountain tops and cliffs; being close enough to the beach to hear the waves; hearing the pine forest winds and having coziness, squared. Meanwhile, places that thumb their collective noses at the elements nevertheless get landslides, fires and floods. The malady is called "lackasense" aka "romanticism".

I suffered it for years and lived in each of those named situations at one time or the other. Later, I got to read about them in the headlines. Now, it's a flat spot above the high water level sans forest, thank you.


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## PanamaJack (Apr 1, 2013)

Everyone want perspective... this is perspective PressTV - Mexico hurricane death toll rises to 97, officials say

97 dead, 21,000 homes cut off and 2,000 evacuated. talking about Alabama, Mississippi or prior hurricanes is not worth the time it takes to write the post. Perspective is yesterday, today and tomorrow and finding out what these people need and now to best help them. If one person dies or 1,000 die its the same perspective, the problem is just that when its the poor that die no one takes notice.


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## lagoloo (Apr 12, 2011)

PanamaJack said:


> Everyone want perspective... this is perspective PressTV - Mexico hurricane death toll rises to 97, officials say
> 
> 97 dead, 21,000 homes cut off and 2,000 evacuated. talking about Alabama, Mississippi or prior hurricanes is not worth the time it takes to write the post. Perspective is yesterday, today and tomorrow and finding out what these people need and now to best help them. If one person dies or 1,000 die its the same perspective, the problem is just that when its the poor that die no one takes notice.


*Perspective* is seeing the big picture, which includes the many public and private charities which do help the poor....as well as the people who don't care.


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

[_QUOTE=Justina;1796273]And perhaps if speculators stopped insisting on building homes where before the water could flow naturally. Tabasco was a case in point some years ago where housing had been built where it shouldn't, with no respect to the inclination or rather natural flow in times of heavy weather.[/QUOTE]_

An interesting perspective from Cadiz, Spain Justina. Dawg has had the opportunity to have spent a lot of time in Spain back in the 1960s and has been retired in Mexico for some 13 years since 2001 and I find your comment about speculators building in Tabasco where housing should not have been built interesting. In my experience, most of the housing built along arroyos and under unstable hillsides in Mexico in states such as Chiapas, Tabasco and Oaxaca as well as next-door Central America have been built by those too impoverished to build elsewhere and they have been able to do so because corrupt authorities have looked the other way not, as in parts of Spain, because the authorities were in cahoots with irresponsible land developers for under-the -table fees ; a phenomenon that brought Spain to the brink of bankruptcy due to irresponsible overdevelopment but because none of the powers- that-were in Mexico gave a damn what happened to the poor ensconced in impoverished shantytowns adjacent to arroyos or unstable mountainsides where whole families might be drowned or buried and smothered in mud from collapsing hillsides so don´t talk to me about irresponsible development among residential speculators, a phenomenon that has brought Spain to the edge of bankruptcy, and compare that phenomenon to the losses of the wretched poor in Southern Mexico. 

These stories are incomparable.


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## Justina (Jan 25, 2013)

I have no interest in defending Spain, but the buildings may be empty, but are still standing. And yes, younare correct that the Mexican authorities have always turned a blind eye to the poor. A lot of States used Infonavit to buy large tracts of land and build rows and rows of homes, but one has to be working and in receipt of Social Security to have the chance to buy one. Unfortunately, they tend to be built with little transport, shops, etc so people prefer to buy their pocket and build room by room as money is available. This year has been worse than previous ones, but every rainy season brings disaster to one area or another perhaps not always on such a big scale, but once the food has been distributed it will be back to the same.


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

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Justina said:



I have no interest in defending Spain, but the buildings may be empty, but are still standing. And yes, younare correct that the Mexican authorities have always turned a blind eye to the poor. A lot of States used Infonavit to buy large tracts of land and build rows and rows of homes, but one has to be working and in receipt of Social Security to have the chance to buy one. Unfortunately, they tend to be built with little transport, shops, etc so people prefer to buy their pocket and build room by room as money is available. This year has been worse than previous ones, but every rainy season brings disaster to one area or another perhaps not always on such a big scale, but once the food has been distributed it will be back to the same.

Click to expand...

_Thanks for you response, Justina but your comments puzzle me as it seems you refer to real estate development phenomena in Andalusia (southern Spain) as well as Mexico´s southern sates and, despite a common (more or less) language, these two places could not be more different despite the fact that both Andalusia and the southern Mexican states are the poor cousins to the rest of their national entities. 

Excuse me for oversimplifying things but the recent Spanish economic crash largely came about because of overexuberance on the part of unbridled capitalists and community leaders with more enthusiasm than brains and the also massive immigration of Northern Europeans into supposedly warmer European regions such as Andalusia and the Costa Del Sol. The phenomena that brought unimaginable misery to southern Mexicans, mostly indigenous people living in squalor with no personal mobility who had no choice but to build homes and villages in unsustainable lands undesirable to others with the resources to buy in fertile and protected valleys not subject to tropical tormentos or periodic flooding were usually indigenous folks with no status beyond their communities - nobody cared and once the biblical floods came along as they always eventually did, those not consigned to live in arroyos or other flood plains always responded, "Well, what´s your problem building in an obvious flood plain. You must be an idiot. Provide your own recompense."


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## Justina (Jan 25, 2013)

Hound Dog, It was you that started talking about Spain and what I meant although should have shut up, is that although the buildings may be empty at least they are not tumbling down as has happened in Mexico with some new buildings that there were poorly built and with lousy drainage. And that did happen in Tabasco just a few years ago.
However, as to Mexico I agree that the poor have no choice. If I remember correctly that whole Diamante area 'belonged' to fishermen and campesinos, until the politicians and speculators moved in and started to drive them out. In years gone by the locals would have known which paths the water would take in a rainy or hurricane summer and leave it be, but the speculators wouldn't care about that and the ones to suffer would be the new owners. 
But back to the poor who started climbing the hills around Acapulco and moving more inland to build on precarious plots of land but without enough money to build solid foundations then they are always at the mercy of the elements. The dishonest local politicians, and it doesn't matter which party we are talking about' give out permission to build in return for a fee, and then turn a blind eye to the construction and of course to a proper survey of where to build and what to build.
One of the other problems why people tend to hang on in their homes even though they realise that the house could come down, is the looting that would take place. We are talking of the Acapulco area, but I am sure the same problem is happening in Veracruz too at the moment. 
Mexico is an extremely rich country in natural resources and it is shameful that year after year one sees the same pitiful photos of one state or another suffering.


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

[_QUOTE=Justina;1805450]Hound Dog, It was you that started talking about Spain and what I meant although should have shut up, is that although the buildings may be empty at least they are not tumbling down as has happened in Mexico with some new buildings that there were poorly built and with lousy drainage. And that did happen in Tabasco just a few years ago.

I´m sorry but I don´t undersand this comment. Buildings in Tabasco collapsed just a few years ago as a result of having been poorly built? I live in Southern Mexico just up the road from Tabasco and I do not know oif this event although I don´t deny it happened. Please explain. 


However, as to Mexico I agree that the poor have no choice. If I remember correctly that whole Diamante area 'belonged' to fishermen and campesinos, until the politicians and speculators moved in and started to drive them out.

The poor have no choice anywhere on the planet but please explain to me the theft of the lands in what you call the "Diamante" and how that relates to the poor in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Tabasco. I do know that the ejidos who owned the land along the Caribbean Coast in Quintana Roo sold the beach lands for nothing and moved their people inland into the Tierra Caliente so the white people could play in the surf and dive into the reefs. A disgusting development.


In years gone by the locals would have known which paths the water would take in a rainy or hurricane summer and leave it be, but the speculators wouldn't care about that and the ones to suffer would be the new owners. 
But back to the poor who started climbing the hills around Acapulco and moving more inland to build on precarious plots of land but without enough money to build solid foundations then they are always at the mercy of the elements. The dishonest local politicians, and it doesn't matter which party we are talking about' give out permission to build in return for a fee, and then turn a blind eye to the construction and of course to a proper survey of where to build and what to build.
One of the other problems why people tend to hang on in their homes even though they realise that the house could come down, is the looting that would take place. We are talking of the Acapulco area, but I am sure the same problem is happening in Veracruz too at the moment. 
Mexico is an extremely rich country in natural resources and it is shameful that year after year one sees the same pitiful photos of one state or another suffering.[/QUOTE]_

In the U.S., the filthy rich insure their properties on the beaches and move back to Birmingham and Atlanta during rough times of tropical storms and tidal surges. In the poverty stricken coastal regions of places such as Mexico, people resolve these issues by drowning and their shacks wash out to sea. Such is earth.


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## Justina (Jan 25, 2013)

Tabasco stayed in my mind cos it was one of the worst disasters in recent years, but most of the southern areas have been hit one year or another and not much changes. 
As to my reference to Tabasco, I suggest you do a google for tabasco floods and you will also have access to youtube videos. Cheers.


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

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Justina said:



Tabasco stayed in my mind cos it was one of the worst disasters in recent years, but most of the southern areas have been hit one year or another and not much changes. 
As to my reference to Tabasco, I suggest you do a google for tabasco floods and you will also have access to youtube videos. Cheers.

Click to expand...

_I know Tabasco, a desperatly poor state and flat Gulf coastal plain subject to repeated flooding , quite well thank you. I suggest you read up on the Soconusco and the Lacandon Forest and the precipitous hillsides throughout the Chiapas Highlands where countless poor people have died in mudslides and inundations sweeping their homes into the sewers and then we can talk.

Southern Mexico is not for random discussion arriving at no conclusion.


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