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Hurricane John

Dear friends,

First I'd like to thank all of you who have called or sent emails to check up on us here. Your concern is greatly appreciated!

Hurricane John for the "La Paz" area was pretty much just a pain in the butt with lots of down trees and scattered power outages all over town. My guess is that for the most part you won't even know there was a hurricane here in a week or two.

It was first thought that John was going to hit Cabo San Lucas and hit hard. At one point on Thursday someone here in the office called a friend who works at CCC in Cabo (Large Grocery Store) and was told they estimated there were 5000 people in the store or waiting to get in. Meanwhile here in La Paz, even though we were supposedly not going to take a direct hit, all the gas stations were full and most ATM's had been sucked dry. We even received a tacky mass emailing from El Patrón restaurant (formally La Divina Uva) over in Vista Coral offering 2 for 1 cerveza' s Friday night to celebrate the hurricane. Word is not too many took them up on the offer.

Now, I wish I would have saved all those tracking maps of John because 4 of the 5 models had ground zero at Cabo, but one consistently said it would travel up the Sea Of Cortez. Additionally, all the commentary I read dismissed it as a rogue model… however I did not. It just didn't make sense that John would hug the coast of mainland Mexico for a thousand miles and when it rounded the corner above Acapulco pick the cold water to the east…. Some of the warmest water on the planet right now is the Sea of Cortez… well, common sense played out as Thursday showed a gradual shift to the east as it rounded that corner. It went from, oh, looks like were going to get a sh*#! load of rain and a couple days off to,,,, #@!^&* ,,, need to get home now to board up the windows…

Cabo was speared the direct hit but Los Barriles was not that lucky. It's been four days since John passed and reports are still sketchy but it doesn't sound encouraging. Yesterday I saw about 40 trucks from the Electric company lined up on the highway heading south. I stopped to ask what was up as I had been without power for 3 days. As soon as the guy said they were heading south to Los Barriles I never mentioned my problem but did ask what he knew… he said, not much but was told to expect to be there for a week.

Lastly, finally getting power and internet I have learned of Mulege's disastrous flood along the river. It appears that John saved the worst for last and sent a huge wall of water down the river destroying most in it's path including the death of at least one person. The below pictures are courtesy the Baja Nomads Forum and with that said I think it would be more beneficial to the people that now need help to concentrate the efforts in one place. Please visit the Nomads for Hurricane John Updates and to help.



Russ Schnieber
9/5/2006

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