Mexico - Chasing Hurricane Dean

I flicked though the pages of the in-flight magazine to take my mind off the violent turbulence. A glossy image of turquoise water lapping a white sand beach had me transfixed. I have been on the road for weeks responding to a trail of disasters around the world. After sleepless nights and intense heat during the floods in India to the freezing cold and chaos of Peru's quake zone, nothing looked more inviting than the beaches of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.
But the flight to Cancun that was usually packed with holidaymakers now only contained a handful of aid workers and journalists and we were not heading for "fun in the sun".
As Hurricane Dean approached, the world's news cameras were poised on Cancun's beaches. But like many hurricanes, Dean decided to take a sudden diversion. The storm, by then a category five hurricane, turned south and smashed into Quintana Roo state with ferocious 165mph (265 kph) winds and 20-feet (six-metre) storm swells. The city of Chetumal, two miles from the Belize border, took the full force of the hurricane and has become the nerve centre for humanitarian response to the region.
The luxury resorts of Cancun were spared and within two days tourists were back shopping in the high-end boutiques. The unfortunate irony is that had Dean hit the resort area of Northern Yucatan as predicted, the solidly built homes and hotels would have withstood the storm.
In stark contrast to the wealth of Cancun, Dean took a path through a much poorer area of the country and the results have been devastating to thousands of families.
When Hurricane Wilma, also rated category five, sat over Cancun for 63 hours in 2005 it caused horrendous damage. Fortunately for the people of Quintana Roo state, Dean swept through and lost power at a much faster rate than expected.
But the destruction is still widespread.
After the storm the city of Chetumal looked like a ravaged battleground. Trees were uprooted, power lines toppled and the water supply knocked out. I saw sheet metal roof panels wrapped around lampposts like ribbons.
It is the rural communities outside of Chetumal that suffered the most. The majority of villagers live in very humble, poorly built wooden homes. Hurricane Dean effortlessly smashed hundreds of these homes to the ground and peeled the roof off most of the rest.
Now residents sit in the tattered frames amongst the belongings that they were able salvage after the storm.
One woman, Maria, could hardly talk about the experience. We found her surveying the contents of her shack, sunlight streamed in through the open roof and illuminated her distressed face. "I was so afraid," she trembled as she described the moment her roof disappeared.
We are working with Mexico's civil protection unit to distribute thousands of roof tile kits in an effort to quickly restore shelter to the vulnerable population.
More rain is on the way and the waterproof tiles are being hammered onto wooden roof frames almost as soon as they are distributed. We are also providing the trucking and logistics needed to shift ton after ton of food and water from the central warehouse in Chetumal to the outlying villages where it is needed the most.
With the hectic activity of the response in Chetumal I had not been tracking Hurricane Dean's progress as it moved inland. The storm had lost much of its power when it made landfall and I was not expecting the telephone call I received. "Hidalgo is underwater," my boss said, with concern in his voice.
Dean was still on the loose over Mexico's interior and unleashing torrents of rain. I handed off the gulf response to our local coordinator and scrambled for Mexico's heartland.
Another turbulent flight and within hours I was in Pachuca, capitol of Hidalgo state and the location of Operation Blessings's Mexico head office.
Our coordinator briefed me with a worrying statistic: "We have just received 25 percent of the average annual rainfall in 26 hours," he said looking at me with a shocked expression. Our phones were ringing off the hook with flood reports coming in from all over the state but there was one name that we kept hearing - "Tulancingo".
Never have I seen water damage in an urban setting as dire as what I saw in Tulancingo on our arrival that evening. I have seen mud huts and wooden shacks washed away by floodwaters but not heavy stone buildings. In just six hours Tulancingo received eight months' worth of rain!
Dean had drawn up water during its path over the Caribbean and unleashed it in flash floods that inundated the city drainage system. Water and mud engulfed homes and businesses, submerged cars and destroyed classrooms. A small river that runs through the city center rose twenty feet above its normal level and swept the foundations out from under homes in its path.
Tulancingo has just been classed as a disaster zone by Mexico's federal government, and it is now estimated that hurricane Dean's rains affected 100,000 people in Hidalgo state.
We found one group of 120 families sheltering in animal pens at the city fairground.
Two days after the floods many families were still unable to return to their homes. Those that can gain access are met with scenes of desolation. As we wade through neighbourhoods delivering relief kits it is heart-wrenching to see poor families shoveling their ruined belongings into piles of festering mud.
Many people have lost everything and it will take many months for the city to recover. But before things get any better they could get worse as the putrid mud and stagnant water have the potential to fuel disease.
Hurricanes look so menacing in satellite images. The huge swirls of thick cloud with their cycloptic eye immediately suggest destruction on a massive scale.
We are captivated by these storms as they bear down on civilisation. At least, it seems, until the circular formation dissipates.
Once Dean had made landfall and the winds weakened, its view from space looked like any other cloud cover anywhere. The world turned its attention elsewhere thinking that Dean was old news.
But hurricane Dean was not going down without a fight and its destructive piece de resistance was the horrendous rain in Hidalgo.
The 2007 Atlantic hurricane season has only just begun. Let Dean be a warning to the region and the world - never underestimate the potential brutal power of a hurricane once it begins to weaken.

Peru Quake - Survivors Camp out on Cold Streets

First came the sound of thunder. Then the ground beneath us began to shift. We were rocked from side to side in our chairs, glasses toppled over, the wooden roof groaned and the sky lit up as power lines fused.
We jumped up and made for open ground when the shaking stopped. Our adrenaline surged, but we were expecting this to happen. It had been an aftershock to the massive 8.0 magnitude earthquake that rocked Peru's Ica province just two days earlier.
The tremor only lasted a few seconds but it was strong and made us nervous about sleeping in our three-storey brick hostel. But it was nothing compared to the quake that left 650 people dead and thousands injured and homeless.
For several minutes, the Nazca and South American tectonic plates ground together 25 miles below the towns of Pisco, Ica and Chincha, and the results have been devastating.
The quake shook with such a force that many of the reinforced concrete buildings in the three towns were reduced to rubble. The majority of local residents live in adobe-style mud brick homes; many of those bricks literally crumbled and turned into dust.
The devastation extends for miles beyond the epicentre and many rural towns and villages have been flattened.
With homes destroyed or damaged and with frequent aftershocks, thousands of people are living in the streets. In some cases belongings have been salvaged and uncannily set up next to the rubble to resemble the former interior.
COLD NIGHTS
It's winter in Peru and the nights are freezing cold. Those sleeping outside run the risk of illness.
Operation Blessing has been providing temporary shelter and blankets to thousands in an effort to keep them warm and out of the emergency clinics. But many have already fallen sick and, with hospitals destroyed, the clinics are struggling to treat injuries and disease.
In the towns, poor hygiene is quickly becoming a fear as toilets and water supplies have been destroyed. We are working with Peru's national civil defense institute (INDECI) to restore sanitation to Pisco by constructing latrines.
Pisco is awash with rescue teams desperately picking through the rubble looking for survivors.
On my flight to Lima I sat next to a K9 dog-team rescue worker from Spain. He told me they would work for eight days, typically the maximum amount of time anyone could survive. Now, four days since the quake, many teams are giving up hope of finding survivors.
"It's just too cold," said one British rescue worker. Some city blocks in Pisco are impenetrable mounds of debris. In many spots the sniffer dogs and workers can only wait for heavy machinery to reveal the dead.
"They will be picking out bodies for weeks," said one Portuguese rescue worker. Every hour, corpses are lined up in the town square where they await identification. Most rescue and aid workers are wearing masks to protect themselves not only from the dust but also the pungent smell of death that penetrates the air.
The road between Pisco and Chinca is perilous. A damaged bridge means that traffic is only able to pass one lane at a time. It takes hours to make the short journey.
Packs of youths have been preying on the cues of traffic, and we have seen aid trucks looted and windows smashed by the opportunists. Fortunately, the military presence has been bolstered and today passed incident-free.
AID POURS IN
In Chincha aid is beginning to pour in from agencies and other parts of Peru. The town's stadium has turned into a huge aid store full of water, coffins, clothes and food.
But the municipality is struggling to cope with the distribution of the goods. So we're moving in to provide transport and logistics.
Today a fleet of Operation Blessing-funded trucks and pickups have begun delivering supplies to the villages and rural areas surrounding Chincha and will continue to do so for days to come.
Many families are leaving the region to stay with relatives. Hoards of people can be found waiting to board buses, clinging to their most valuable possessions.
But this migration is actually making our job easier. We're finding that the thousands of families without the resources to leave are the ones that need assistance the most.
It will take years to reconstruct the region. In the town of Arequipa, a local resident described to me how the church had been destroyed and rebuilt three times due to earthquakes.
Now as the faithful residents prepare to reconstruct their church for a fourth time, they must wonder when the next quake will strike. These last few days have been nerve-wracking enough, I could not imagine spending a lifetime living on this fault line.
While writing this blog, another aftershock struck. I ran down two flights of stairs and into the street to join others searching for safety. The shaking lasted only for about 15 seconds but it was enough to shatter everyone's nerves a little more and send a warning to the quake victims of Ica province: it will be a cold night ahead.

India Dispatch - Snakes on a Floodplain

"Look out for landmines," shouted my Indian colleague as we stepped out of the boat at the village of Malitola. I had not heard of landmines being used in this part of India and quickly moved into the middle of the muddy path. As I did I heard laughter from my team members behind me.
"That's a landmine," one of them chortled, pointing to a pile of excrement on the path's edge.
Slightly relieved, I took note of the "landmine" and saw more and more as we entered the village. This was human excrement and it filled the air with a pungent stench.
I have never seen such a concentration of feces so close to village homes before and fear the implications.
I am in the northeastern state of Bihar working on the flood relief effort.
This part of the world is no stranger to flooding but for many in India this year has been the worst in memory.
Eighteen continuous days of monsoon rains drenched the region, the water flowing off the Himalayas through Nepal, into India and draining via Bangladesh.
The floods have claimed hundreds of lives and affected an estimated 50 million people in the three nations combined.
In Bihar, hundreds of thousands of people are still stranded by floodwater, as their villages have become islands. Food is scarce and now the fear of a medical catastrophe is looming over the region.
India now has two distinct faces, one of growth and wealth and one of extreme poverty. Bihar is far removed from the bustling IT economies of India's big cities and is one of the poorest states in the country.
Most people live a life of simple subsistence farming so this disaster will be a major setback and further widen the gap between the Bihar farmer and the Bangalore computer technician.
Operation Blessing is working with the Duncan Hospital in Rexaul, right on the Nepal border. Together we have formed relief teams and have been venturing out to stranded villages by boat to deliver relief kits containing food, essential hygiene items and emergency medical supplies.
Bihar is huge and very remote, as far as I know we are the only organisations serving East Champaran district, where 350,000 people have been affected by the floods.
Over the last few days it has been a rush to reach as many marooned villagers as possible. At first it was a simple task of loading boats with relief kits and sending teams out over a sea of floodwater.
But as each day passes the water level is dropping and navigation is becoming harder.
Yesterday we became grounded several times and we found ourselves having to push our boat through knee-deep, leech-infested, muddy floodwater.
In a few days the water will have receded to where boats are useless. The quagmire left behind will make reaching stranded communities impossible for several days.
We have been able to distribute thousands of relief kits but there are still hundreds of thousands of people trapped throughout the Bihar flood "archipelago" who have received nothing.
Every disaster has a unique set of problems that arise after the main event. Just recently in China we saw how a plague of rats fled rising floodwaters and terrorised villagers in Hunan.
Bihar is also being plagued, but here it is by snakes. The snakes are converging on the same high ground that the villagers inhabit and people are being bitten at an alarming rate.
Duncan hospital is receiving an average of two bite victims per day and those are people that are able to reach Rexaul!
The most common venomous snake is the krait, a member of the viper family. Its deadly bite contains haemotoxic venom that causes its victim to bleed to death.
And then there is the infamous cobra with its neurotoxic venom. The snakebites are claiming lives but not all snakes here are venomous.
I wonder if the psychological effect of the snakebite could become the biggest killer.
I am used to working in the developing world, where we place a great deal of emphasis on hygiene education. One of the most basic principles taught in any hygiene curriculum is to go to the toilet away from your home and water supply.
As I scanned Malitola village and its "landmines" on my first day I was shocked that the villagers seemed to be breaking every rule in the book.
When I enquired as to why the villagers seemed to have such a disregard for sanitation the answer I received put things into perspective.
"We're afraid of the snakes," one villager said in defence.
It seems that the villagers of Bihar fear the very visible threat of a snakebite over the invisible threat of becoming sick through poor hygiene.
Rather than venture out into the bushes they prefer to go to the toilet right outside their home.
Combined with the stagnant floodwater, it is no surprise that the United Nations is warning that Bihar is a ticking time bomb waiting for a huge explosion of disease.
For some places it is already too late.
In Malitola one in five people had acute diarrhoea and were complaining of abdominal pains. The same could be said for all of the villages we have reached, and Duncan hospital has already started treating cholera patients.
Knowing of each village's impending isolation as the waters recede, we have been leaving behind medical supplies such as oral rehydration salts, paracetamol and water purification tablets.
For the villagers in the flood zone the outlook is bleak. If they are not struck by cholera, then typhoid, malaria and a whole host of other diseases are waiting in the wings.
Failed crops and general substandard conditions make life difficult for Bihar's population at the best of times.
One doctor at Duncan hospital told me that even before this disaster they were treating an average of two attempted suicide poisonings per day.
Now many people have lost everything. This disaster has crushed families financially, physically and even spiritually.
For many Hindus the loss of their sacred cows will take the misery of this disaster to a level beyond the norm.
As soon as we have access we will be sending medical teams back into the villages but by then it could be too late for many people.