'Mexico Scrambles To Repair, Re-Open Its Coastal Resorts' - Nov. 6 Vt. Times Argus

* Please note that this article erroneously states that Playa Norte was stripped of its beach -- NOT TRUE! Just scroll down to fotos and links to more photos of Post-Wilma Playa Norte & Playa Sol -- all with Cancun's sand. ~ LDC

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Mexico scrambles to repair, re-open its coastal resorts

November 6, 2005 © 2005 Times Argus


By SUSAN FERRISS Cox News Service


CANCUN, Mexico – Hurricane Wilma, Mexico's most expensive natural disaster ever, has insurance agents and desperate hotel chains scurrying to survey and repair widespread damage in one of the world's most profitable tourism destinations.

Wilma claimed miraculously few human lives in Mexico. But the economic impact couldn't be greater as this part of the country struggles to recover from the massive storm.

The estimated cost of repairing Cancun and other Caribbean resorts is reaching into the billions of dollars.

The state of Quintana Roo, where Cancun sits, accounts for 38 percent of the country's tourism revenue. The hit from Wilma prompted Goldman Sachs to lower its estimate for 2005 economic growth in Mexico, from 2.8 percent to 2.5 percent.

Officials say that about 80 percent of the hotels in Cancun suffered some damage, robbing the local economy of about $15 million a day. The city's more than 750,000 residents all depend directly or indirectly on tourism.

"I speak English. I have an education. And now I'm in the same shape as the poorest here," said a devastated Lyssette Casarin, 35, whose workplace, Cancun's popular Lorenzillo's restaurant, was reduced to floating rubble by the storm.

The damage assessment from Wilma was under way even before airlines could get all of tens of thousands of foreign tourists stranded here on flights out of Cancun.

Thousands languished here into the weekend, a week after Wilma struck, standing in long lines to get boarding passes, running out of money, sometimes shelling out thousands of extra credit-card dollars to airlines and angry that departure information was so hard to obtain.

President Vicente Fox set Dec. 15 – the start of the lucrative winter tourist season – as an ambitious target for getting 80 percent of rooms on the famed Cancun hotel strip restored and ready for visitors.

But a key attraction for U.S. and other tourists is missing – Wilma washed much of the sandy beach away.

The government wants to quickly push ahead with a Herculean project to dredge sand and deposit it where waves now wash up against some hotel property foundations. Already in the planning stages before Wilma struck, the beach restoration is certain now to cost much more than the $200 million that the government had budgeted.

Restoration of some hotel rooms is already under way and bulldozers were busy clearing debris. Some tour operators were already planning to fly in tourists to the lesser-damaged resorts of the Maya Riviera as early as next week.

Fox toured the disaster zone by helicopter Friday and heard shouts for water and food relief from flood victims on Holbox Island off the Yucatan Peninsula.

"Zero bureaucracy," Fox said, and he promised a "quick solution" to the crisis.

Running water remains scarce in many of the poorer areas and sewage-soaked streets are covered with lime to prevent the spread of disease.

Fox has made two trips here in less than a week and apologized to the poor for delays in help.

"The authorities are focused on the hotel zone. Of course, we all live from that so we agree with doing that. But we urgently need water and electricity here. It's always the big guys first, then the little ones. It's like that in all the countries in the world," said Ivonne Rosado, 41, who – until Wilma – was a maid in a beauty shop at the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Rosado surveyed a sopping heap of sofas, mattresses and ruined appliances outside her cinderblock home in the working-class Las Culebras barrio, which was engulfed by more than five feet of water during a fierce night of the hurricane. The maid and other occupants made a desperate swim to safety through the darkness to get to a home on higher ground down their street.

Fox is offering emergency federal reconstruction funds and pressuring banks to postpone debt collection. The government is also allowing hotels to forgo tax payments and postpone paying employee government social security benefits in exchange for the hotels doing the best they can to keep workers on payroll.

"Many of those who work here in the hotels live by tips. They make about $5 a day in wages," said Edgar Gonzalez, 30, a reception manager at the Royal Solaris Cancun.

No tourist or resident deaths were reported in Cancun or the nearby islands of Cozumel and Isla Mujeres. Three Mexicans in other parts of the Yucatan peninsula died from burns in incidents related to the storm.

In downtown Cancun, at an intersection where Delta Air Lines set up card tables to issue boarding passes, Atlanta architect John Eisenlau, 42, stood with scores of other tourists grimly trying to get on an emergency flight.

"I'd give it a year at best" before most of the strip is ready for guests, he said. "You want to analyze this building by building before letting anyone in."

A guest at the Royal Mayan Hotel, Eisenlau said he and others in his shelter had to go out ins the eye of the storm and after to find syringes and other medicines for people with diabetes and help doctors figure out dosages for elderly people who didn't have medical information at hand.

Stranded tourists, as many as an estimated 35,000 to 40,000, mostly praised Mexican hotel workers for protecting them and feeding them during the hurricane, although sanitation became horrible in many shelters and some people became ill.

Complaints about airlines and the U.S. government response were plentiful.

"It's just unreal. We were let down," said Valley, Ala., resident Richard Tharpe, 48, who used his cellular phone to call the State Department, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and senators to describe the dire conditions.

"Our country didn't pull through for us," said Tamara Spencer of Albany, N.Y., who was packed into a theater serving as a shelter for days.

U.S. officials said they did their best under trying circumstances.

U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Judith Bryan accompanied U.S. consular officials from Mexico City who had to plow through a deeply flooded highway with the help of Mexican marines after spending a night by the side of the road.

"It took us 24 hours to get here and that was part of the problem," she said.

U.S. officials faced the daunting task of helping far more U.S. citizens than any other country, she said. When the storm hit, there were an estimated 12,000 Americans in 180 locations in the Cancun area and another 5,000 to 7,000 down the coast.

As the Atlantic region faces the possibility of more monster hurricanes in the future after a tough season, Wilma has left Mexico – and other vulnerable regions of Latin America – with valuable lessons on the need to improve plans for evacuation and recovery.

Hurricane Stan only weeks ago claimed thousands of lives in Central America in landslides that buried villages and flooding.

This weekend, a new storm named Beta was bearing down on Colombia and Nicaragua.

Former Austin, Texas, resident Adair Crow, 46, rode out the storm on the upper floor of his home in a working-class area of Cancun, where he runs a now damaged photography and graphics studio.

Helping his dejected neighbors pile up their ruined belongings in huge heaps on the street, he said, "People have so much money invested here that Mexico is not going to let it die. I think the market is going to have to change because we don't have a beach."

He added: "People come here for the beach, the booze and the babes."


© 2005 Times Argus