Sunday Night and Monday morning were not great days for Zihuatanejo, and probably much of the Pacific coast of Guerrero up through Lazaro Cardenas. The Category 2 Hurricane Rick spent several hours wreaking havoc on my adopted town.

I really had no idea that a storm was coming until Friday. In the four years Ali and I have been here we’ve had maybe five tropical storms but never anything terribly serious. Streets flood, the storm makes a mess of the beaches, then moves on. This time was different. Saturday evening it started raining and continued through Sunday. I started getting nervous based on how other people appeared to be preparing.

On Sunday afternoon I started piecing together tarps and whatever I could find around our house to cover the open windows. Obviously those weren’t going to do anything, and we would wake up Monday morning to the upstairs flooded. You would think a house in the middle of construction wouldn’t have much to damage, but we had just finished applying the “pasta,” the nice-looking white cement layer on all of the concrete walls. Hurricane Rick took care of our nice new walls.

Everything was fine Sunday evening, though, just a little rain into the late evening. I was up until 12:30 or 1:00am and it had started to pick up in intensity by the time I went to bed. At some point in the evening the hurricane had been bumped to a category 2. I still was thinking that it would mostly avoid us and stay in the Pacific Ocean. Within an hour of going to bed we were in the middle of the storm.

Everything was a blur. With the rain and the wind we were just trying to minimize the damage. I went outside a couple of times to try and re-cover cement bags and protect whatever I could from the rain and debris. At about 2:30am Ali noticed that our big tree was down in the backyard. The next door neighbor saw it go down and told me the following day it was scary because they saw it swaying between our properties and were concerned it was going to fall into their house. It was so dark outside we had no idea how much damage the tree had done. The funny thing is the power was going off and on every 15 minutes. And when it went on the pool lights would go on and we could see a little of the backyard and then the power cuts out and we can’t see anything again. I doubt anyone in Zihua slept that night. We were getting messages from friends in town throughout the night. When the tree went down was when I really felt helpless. I was watching the hurricane’s path on my phone and just counting the minutes until it moved north of us. Finally around 4am it seemed as though the worst had gone by and we went to bed.

We woke up with the sun at 7:30am to assess the damage. We dealt with the flooding upstairs first, then I checked the pool. We lost some of our roof, power lines were down and on the car, but our initial feeling was we dodged a bullet. Up until 10:30am or so we cleaned up then went back to bed for a couple hours.

Later we walked through town. It had stopped raining by about 2pm, and the sun came out shortly after that. Lots of trees down everywhere, lots of debris everywhere, a few damaged cars, metal roofs really struggled to stay on buildings. But everyone was out cleaning up. I’m sure there are people that lost a lot more than the tree and the fence we lost. Zihua set up a shelter for people at the municipal gym. Somehow with all the power lines still down on our street we didn’t lose power in our house that long. At our condo the power was off much of Monday, but otherwise it survived just fine.

There’s not really anything to do, but start cleaning up. So we climbed through the big, fallen tree and felt very thankful that it only appeared to damage the fencing. We have a house on each side of us and a restaurant below us. Part of the tree was resting on the roof of the restaurant, as if it just laid down to sleep after being in the same spot for the last 70 or 80 years. We collected the roofing, cleaned the pool, started cutting down the smaller branches on the tree. I have no idea when we’ll be able to get this tree out of there. It’s probably not a priority for whoever ends up having to move it out of here.

It was a bit scary. I’m anxious to get our home remodel done and secured from the elements. And I’m really hopeful that’s the last of the storms for a while.