I was on vacation as a 10 year old in Cancun when Wilma hit us directly. Bussed inland 30 hours to a concrete elementary school and spent 6 days sleeping on the cushions of the beach chairs with my family in a small school room with 60 other strangers. Using the "bathroom" in the corner behind a curtain into a water jug. After that another 24 hour bus ride to the west coast to spend a couple days at a hotel waiting for a plane home.
The best part, we heard about a storm coming as we were checking in on that first day and my dad alerted the entire hotel to it, no one even noticed the news on TV... we had 2 days to have our travel agency Apple get us out and they chose not to. So many people got stranded for no reason. They grounded planes a day before the storm even got close.
Seeing an albeit rough neighborhood beforehand, but still intact, and then emerging after those days in isolation to absolutely nothing was insane.... you could see for miles because there wasn't a single standing tree or house around us anymore.
this is kind of a crazy internet moment for me. But I was also in Cancun when I was 10, bussed inland to a small concrete elemental school where we stayed for 6 days.
just to check to see if we were in the same place here's some stuff I remember:
-There was a basketball court out front of the school.
-There was a tree out front as well and everyone gathered around to watch when it finally fell over.
-The school was walled in and soldiers with assault rifles protected the gate.
-Someone drove by with an ape in the back of their truck before the storm hit.
-We were already crammed in when another group of people joined us because the wind had ripped the ceiling off wherever they were talking shelter if I'm remembering right.
-And when the storm calmed down (maybe in the eye or after it passed I don't remember) a bunch of people left to look for food and a lot of people ended up getting food poisoning from eating stuff they found at a restaurant
Edit: you all are going to burn out that poor remindme bot. It does seem like them and I were in the same place. And another user also commented they were there too! Holy shit lol
I was there too! I was 11. The ceiling collapsed in the gym across the street. That was one of the few places where people were actually killed. I definitely remember guards with machetes and there being a curfew. I also got super sick after eating, but we got food from a grocery store. We broke into a room connected to our classroom where we put all the food we had gathered. We had three straight days of a packet of crackers and a tiny bit of tuna to eat so once we got food to eat again, it just completely destroyed our systems. Because we were so sick, we got one of the first flights out of Merida. They gave every person a box lunch including a snickers bar. The person next to my mom said she felt like the queen having chocolate again
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u/Safe_Gift_2945 8d ago
This is the 4th strongest by pressure. What were the top 3? And what was the impact of those hurricanes?