An Awful Silence in Dean's Eye for a Handful of Survivors in Majahual

MAJAHUAL, Mexico (AP) -- After a deafening roar that lasted for hours, an eerie silence came over Majahual. The smell of the sea rose up, and lightning bolts illuminated the storm's inner eyewall.

Tuesday, August 21st 2007, 10:22 pm

By: News On 6

MAJAHUAL, Mexico (AP) -- After a deafening roar that lasted for hours, an eerie silence came over Majahual. The smell of the sea rose up, and lightning bolts illuminated the storm's inner eyewall.

But the knot in Luisa Calderon's stomach only tightened. Her father had told her about hurricanes, and she knew hours of relentless pounding were still to come. Hunkered down with her husband in a two-story concrete-and-brick house that was shaken off its foundation, she commended herself to God.

``There came a moment when I said, 'Thy will be done,''' said Calderon, 36.

She was among a handful of people who refused military orders to evacuate before Hurricane Dean attacked the cruise-ship port Tuesday with winds of 165 mph and gusts of 200 mph--faster than the takeoff speed of many passenger jets.

The storm weakened as it moved westward across the Yucatan peninsula Tuesday, but was expected to strengthen again as its eye moved across the Bay of Campeche in the heart of Mexico's oil industry. The sprawling storm was projected to slam into the mainland Wednesday afternoon with renewed force near Laguna Verde, Mexico's only nuclear power plant.

But no place would see as intense winds as Majahual, where Dean came ashore. Few places ever have: Dean was the third most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in recorded history.

``It wasn't minutes of terror. It was hours. I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not,'' said Catharine Morales, 30, a native of Montreal, Canada, who has lived in Majahual for a year. ``The walls felt like they were going to explode.''

Morales weathered the storm in her new brick-walled house with her husband and 7-month-old daughter Luna.

``The wind would pound on one side of the house, then the other. There were times when I would breath deep, and try to calm myself,''she said. ``Then a minute later I would be thinking, it's going to collapse.''

Dean blew out their windows and pulled pieces from their roof, but they fared better than most: Hundreds of Majahual homes collapsed as Dean crumpled steel girders, splintered wooden structures and washed away about half of the immense concrete dock that transformed the sleepy fishing village into Mexico's second-busiest cruise ship destination.

The storm surge covered almost the entire town in waist-deep sea water like a giant mirror, said fishermen Jorge Gonzalez. He found refuge in the back room of a beachfront store whose steel security curtains were blown out, and had to help his retriever Camilo keep his head above the rising tide.

``There came a moment when I thought this was the end,'' Gonzalez said. ``The darkness, the noise, the wind, the water!''

It took many hours for Mexico's military to get through to what remained of Majahual, where Carnival and Royal Caribbean cruise ships regularly docked. Soldiers searched for victims amid pieces of houses tossed onto the concrete-littered beach.

Despite the destruction, President Felipe Calderon said no deaths were immediately reported in Mexico, after Dean killed 13 people in the Caribbean. But driving rain, poor communications and impassable roads made it difficult to determine how isolated Mayan communities fared in the sparsely populated jungle.

While 50,000 tourists were safely evacuated from resorts on the Yucatan peninsula, many poor Indians closer to the storm's direct path refused military orders to leave their homes, according to Gen. Alfonso Garcia, who was running shelters in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, 60 miles northwest of Majahual.

Troops evacuated more than 250 small communities, and 8,000 people took refuge in 500 shelters, said Jorge Acevedo, a Quintana Roo state spokesman. Others turned away soldiers with machetes and refused to leave, but some of them changed their minds when the winds and rain intensified, he said.

Little was known about the thousands who rode out the storm in low-lying communities of stick huts.

``I'm really worried the hurricane passed over the Mayan communities, which are the poorest on the Yucatan peninsula,'' Calderon said before leaving Canada on a flight to Chetumal to assess the damage.

At 8 p.m. EDT, Dean had winds of 80 mph and was centered about 110 miles west of Campeche. It was moving west at 20 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.

Dean was moving directly through Mexico's productive offshore oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico, where operations were shut down Tuesday, reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Insured losses from the storm are likely to range between $750 million and $1.5 billion, according to Risk Management Solutions, which calculates hurricane damage for the insurance industry. Most of that came in Jamaica, which said Tuesday it was postponing Aug. 27 general elections to survey the damage. Mexico's insured losses won't exceed $400 million, predicted AIR Worldwide, another insurance consulting company.

The latest forecast put the storm on target to hit land again Wednesday afternoon at Tecolutla, a coastal river town about halfway between Tampico and Veracruz. The area is an oil-industry hub, dotted with derricks and pipelines on land and home to many of the workers who maintain seven oil platforms a half-hour helicopter ride offshore.

``We often see that when a storm weakens, people let down their guard completely. You shouldn't do that,'' said Jamie Rhome at the U.S. National Hurricane Center. ``This storm probably won't become a Category 5 again, but it will still be powerful.''

Dean moved from Majahual to the state capital of Chetumal, where residents spent a harrowing night with windows shattering and heavy water tanks flying off rooftops. Sirens wailed for hours as the storm battered the city, hurling billboards down streets. The Federal Electricity Commission said 90,000 customers remained without power by midday.

Electricity was also out to most of Belize, where no deaths or major injuries were reported. Just south of the Mexican border in Corozal, Dean flipped a residential trailer, blew roofs from homes and flooded streets.

Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute said no damage was reported at any of the archaeological sites in the states of Quintana Roo and Yucatan. Officials also closed all sites in Campeche and Veracruz as Dean approached.

Dean's projected path is 400 miles south of Texas, where only heavy surf was expected. The space shuttle Endeavour landed a day early Tuesday because of the threat NASA had once feared Dean would pose to Mission Control in Houston.

Calderon cut short a trip to Canada so he could travel to the hardest-hit areas. President Bush, standing by his side at a summit in Montebello, offered U.S. aid.

``We stand ready to help,'' Bush said. ``The American people care a lot about the human condition in our neighborhood, and when we see human suffering we want to do what we can.''