The Thursday night after our arrival, a couple things hit at once. Volcan Pacaya, an intermittently active volcano within sight of the airport, erupted. Three people were killed and hundreds of houses were destroyed. A thick haze of volcanic ash covered much of the surrounding countryside.
This all occurred a few hours after Caroline had boarded a shuttle to Guatemala city, and about ten hours before her scheduled flight the next morning. Her shuttle was delayed two hours as it churned through six inches of volcanic sludge. When I finally got through to her hotel, she was completely unaware of the eruption. Black rain and gridlocked traffic had apparently fit her expectations of Guatemala’s sprawling, dirty capital. We were told the flight had been rescheduled to Monday. After Iceland, we should have known better.
Seeing as we had been granted an extra weekend, that Friday afternoon I drove into Antigua to pick her up. My idea was to spend the weekend in the Mayan ruins in Copan, six hours away. I’d heard a tropical depression was forming in the pacific, and I hoped we could find some sun to the east.
We awoke in Antigua to a downpour, always a bad sign. Usually, even in the depths of the rainy season, it doesn’t cloud over until after noon. Undaunted, we dashed to the truck and headed east, once again via Guatemala City.
Soon it became evident this wasn’t a typical rainy day. We could barely see through the windshield, and droplets were seeping through the gothic rose-window cracks onto the dashboard. Figuring we could take care of long-postponed business, and perhaps let the rain pass by, we asked directions to a windshield repair shop.
An hour and sixty bucks later White Thunder had a new windshield, but it was pouring harder than ever. Water was accumulating faster than it could drain off the central boulevards. Furthermore, the fan on our defroster died (perhaps due to the dousing sustained by the dashboard). Along with the acrylic miasma of sealant, this forced us to drive with windows open, mopping the windshield and bailing our interior with a sopping towel.
After several false turns, I decided to further seek shelter in the mall. We could watch a movie, clear our heads and let the car dry out in underground parking. Around noon I got a call from Santa Cruz. The depression was now Tropical Storm Agatha. Our neighbors and villagers were battling mudslides, flooding, and dozens of torrential rivers that were chewing out their own paths. Power and water were out, villages were being evacuated, and acts of heroism being committed. The ambulance boat and an armada of volunteers had mobilized to evacuate families off of collapsing docks and calving embankments.
I couldn’t stop thinking of the chaos back in Santa Cruz and the bizarre paradox of the Cineplex. Leaving the parking garage, we found that if anything the rain was only coming down harder. Although it was only three it seemed like nightfall. Standing water up to a foot deep covered the city.
For the next three hours, we labored through some of the trickiest driving I’ve ever done. Electricity went out. The phosphorus flicker of downed power lines and the pulse of blue lights filtered through the deluge. Rocks, trees, and broken-down vehicles loomed in the road. Changing lanes was idiocy yet essential to merge around obstacles and follow detours. I have rarely been so relieved to make it anywhere as I was to pull back in front of our hostel in Antigua.
The next morning, I was awoken early by a panicky cell-phone call from Guadalupe, our nurse practitioner. She was running the clinic on her own, without power or running water and short on medications. Caroline and I jumped into the truck without checking the news. The sky was perfectly blue.
We soon found most of the highway had only one lane cleared . The devastation was unbelievable. After creeping along for most of the morning, we arrived at a line of traffic that wasn’t going anywhere. The next five kilometers of the Pan-American highway were completed blocked by landslides. Road crews were working in from the outside one layer at a time. Our second aborted attempt to leave the hostel got some good-natured laughs from the staff.
Mudlides in the 5km stretch of the PanAmerican highway that was blocked during the storm
We took advantage of our exile to follow the news. Over a hundred people were dead and missing across the country. Highways across the country were destroyed. We’d driven in the heaviest rainfall the capital had received in over sixty years. A freakish sinkhole over a hundred feet across had opened in Guatemala City, swallowing a three-story building. It was only a short distance from where we’d have our windshield changed. The airport, of course, remained closed until further notice.
That night, the truck was broken into on the street. The side window had been broken. There was almost nothing inside to steal, other than a stack our burned CDs (mostly bluegrass and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), some old clothes, and Caroline’s sneakers (with $300 orthotics inside, the worst blow). It wasn’t quite looting, but it added to the general sense of chaos.
Flooded highways two days after the storm
We make it back to the lake that day, with another detour to replace the broken window. It was a feat that the highway had even been opened. The landslides were big—nearly five kilometers of single-lane, alternating traffic, where the mud had been shoved up into thick walls on either side. Upon my arrival in Panajachel, I immediately picked up Noé and Micaela, local Mayans who worked for the NGO Amigos de Santa Cruz. They’d been my initial contacts with the three communities due to their extensive work there. We’d had no word how they’d fared and intended to find out.
Farmers in Solola standing at the foot of a mudslide that wiped out a barn and fields
We turned around and drove to Laguna Seca, then Chuitzanchaj. We plowed along in 4WD, being turned back three times to more circuitous pathways due to impassible mud and landslides. It was the first time White Thunder has visited the towns she’d later live in. Fortunately these two had been relatively spared, with only a few collapsed houses. The road to Pajomel was completely impassible, but it appeared other than their isolation they’d been similarly fortunate.
The road between Pahomel and Chuitzanchaj, after being cleared of debris. Since then, unsurprisingly, it has continued to deteriorate and is now impassable once again.
It was dark by the time I arrived in Santa Cruz, so I wasn’t able to take in the scope of destruction until the next morning. Even at night, it was evident the lake was covered in layer of trash, pumice stone and branches.
In the morning, I was blown away by the destruction. The saturated earth had torn out like zebra stripes in the hillside. Huge ravines scarred the shoreline where torrential rivers had risen out of small drainages. Acres of property, forests or fields had disappeared. The village of Jaibalito, a twenty minute walk away, had been evacuated multiple times, most recently by the military in the middle of the night. Houses were buried in mud and gravel up to their ceilings. A refugee camp had been erected in the Santa Cruz municipal building.
Houses destroyed by a new riverbed that opened in a drainage
Of course, much of the destruction had been long predictable. Guatemala was no stranger to mudslides. The walls of the lake, actually the crater of an ancient eruption, seem to approach vertical. As villagers were driven further to cut firewood and plant corn, the deforestation was asymptotically creeping towards the rim. Meanwhile, gringos and wealthy Guatemalans were parceling up the land along the shore, squeezing houses closer to river banks and pushing communities onto flood plains. Entire villages had been destroyed by landslides during Hurricane Stan in 2005, burying hundreds of people alive, but little had changed since then.
Streets are buried in mud in Jaibalito
That morning the clinic staff conducted outreach clinic in Jaibalito—a village we had rarely visited due to its small size and proximity to Santa Cruz. We saw dozens and dozens of patients that morning. People were traumatized and shell-shocked, with the added burden of the mud, cut-off water, washed-out latrines, and destroyed homes. Things weren’t helped by the fact that Guatemalan Ministry of Public Health had recently declared bankruptcy and none of its staff had been paid nor medications purchased for two months.
More houses in Jaibalito buried halfway in debris
Electricity ended up returning about three days later, and running water (still non-potable) within a week. Caroline’s plane got delayed twice more, pushed back to Sunday—nine days later than planned. The citizens of Jaibalito have refused to relocate their village, declared too dangerous by the government, and have therefore forfitted public assistance in case of a future emergency. Dozens of communities and hundreds of individuals in the path of hanging mud fields, denuded hillsides, and boulder-clogged ravines and watersheds. The concensus is that although disaster may have been averted this time, the scene has been set for a catastrophic countercoup as hurricane season moves in. In the meantime, it appears obvious much of our agenda at the clinic for the coming year will be dictated by the aftermath of Agatha.
Hiking around the hillsides has become a little tricky lately
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