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 Travel & Outdoors | May 2006 
Hurricanes Expose Flaws in Idyllic Cancun
 Greg Brosnan - Reuters
| | A Cancun resident sits beside the wrecked sea wall and deserted beach of the Mexican Caribbean resort October, 2005. Hurricane Wilma, which last October ripped out much of Cancun's beach, devastated hotels and forced thousands of foreign vacationers into filthy shelters, has highlighted the dangers of underestimating nature's wrath when planning a paradise. (Henry Romero/Reuters) |
Cancun, Mexico - Armed with statistics on sunshine, temperatures and rainfall, central bank bureaucrats scoured Mexico in the late 1960s for the perfect spot to put one of the world's first tourist traps designed from scratch.
By the middle of the next decade, a once-deserted strip of Caribbean sand previously known only to a few fishermen was a world-famous resort with bars, hotels, a golf course and an international airport earning Mexico floods of hard currency.
There was however a snag - the resort sits on a hurricane route.
Hurricane Wilma, which last October ripped out much of Cancun's beach, devastated hotels and forced thousands of foreign vacationers into filthy shelters, has highlighted the dangers of underestimating nature's wrath when planning a paradise.
"It wasn't a bad thing to build it here," said Araceli Dominguez, president of a Cancun-based environmental group, GEMA. "It was the way they built it."
"It's a hurricane zone. If they put buildings 20 meters (66 feet) from the sea and build concrete walls, what do they expect? ... Eventually the sea is going to wash them away."
One of the fiercest hurricanes to hit Mexico, Wilma left Cancun's exclusive strip of more than 100 luxury hotels looking like a war zone after pummeling the white-sanded Caribbean coast for three full days last October.
$1.5 BILLION IN DAMAGE
Damage in the state of Quintana Roo where Cancun is located was estimated at $1.5 billion. Hotels lay gutted and broken, jagged rocks poked from gray water after Wilma had torn away entire banks of white sand.
Soon after work began to dump tons of fresh sand onto the seafront, a tide washed much of it away, leaving a two-story beach where tourists clamber down a sandy step to get to the sea.
Some locals dependent on tourism still feel the pinch and many worry with the 2006 hurricane season only a few weeks away.
"I'm trying to save a little more money to have a bit of security," said Mario Mendoza, who said income from his souvenir store dried up for three months after Wilma. "We might get an even stronger one."
With so much at stake in terms of lost revenue, Cancun has been rebuilt at breakneck speed.
Where electricity pylons lay twisted and taps ran dry, running water, electricity and sewage facilities have been restored. Builders are still patching up some hotels that took advantage of storm damage to renovate but few other signs of Wilma's wrath are evident.
Business was abysmal at the end of last year but local officials put average hotel room occupancy at 80 percent this year.
The damage has left burning criticism about the lack of control over building and the way natural barriers like mangrove swamps and dune vegetation were ripped out to make way for hotels.
LIVING WITH HURRICANES
"We have to learn to live with hurricanes," said Alfredo Arellano, director of government-protected areas on the Yucatan Peninsula. "That means being more careful, not only about where to build but also about the type of buildings we build."
"Architects' whims often come first," he said. "Instead of adapting their projects to nature they want nature to adapt to their projects."
He said his agency had proposed replanting part of the beach with small shrubs, native palm trees and vines, to anchor the sand.
Ricardo Alvarado, Cancun's director of Fonatur, the government agency that helped create the resort, said new buildings would be better suited to a hurricane zone and that some hotels were planning in-house shelters.
He has no doubts, however, about the wisdom of building here.
"It was a magnificent idea," he said. "If you weigh the benefits Cancun has produced in terms of the number of jobs and revenue from tourist cash ... against the costs generated by the hurricane, it is still very profitable for the country."
For some tourists who lived through it, Wilma was the scariest experience of their lives. Many hope to return but say it will take a lot of nerve.
"It was the longest eight days of my life," said Kim Peace of Kennesaw, Georgia, who spent more than a week in a shelter and who runs a Web site where survivors have posted their experiences (http://www.wilmaslastresort.com).
She says her Wilma experience will not prevent her from returning to Cancun.
"But I'll be very, very careful about what the weather's doing," she said.
(Additional reporting by Lorraine Orlandi) |
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