Employees Survive Baja Hurricane - And Return Engaged

Hurricane Odile flooding outside the resort.

The Category 3 hurricane made landfall in the resort town of Cabo San Lucas just before 11 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 14. The power went out everywhere and it was pitch black. Sirens and alarms were blaring adding to the sound of the building rattling.  The storm sounded like a freight train going through their fourth floor hotel room. They had taped up the windows to keep glass from being shattered by the 125 mile-per-hour winds. This went on for 6 hours.

Neither Supervising Probation Officer Terry Fick nor Emily Duke, an executive secretary for the Health and Human Services Agency expected or were prepared for Hurricane Odile. They were lucky to make it out of the Baja California town unscathed. The destruction was immense; several people were killed, including tourists like them.

County employees Emily Duke and Terry Fink show off their catch days before a Category 3 hurricane devastated Cabo San Lucas.The Cabo San Lucas marina early Sunday morning. The hurricane made landfall late that evening.
Although it is hurricane season, there was no storm forecast when they arrived. Later, when meteorologists warned of a thunderstorm or tropical storm, locals told them people were overreacting. It truly wasn’t until Sunday evening when things began looking serious because the hotel asked guests to go to their rooms to wait out the storm.

“It was crazy,” Duke says remembering the storm. “But also, something good came out of it.”

You see, in the middle of the storm, there was about an hour of silence and calm as the eye passed over. And Fick planned to propose to Duke, whom he’s dated for almost two years, on the trip.

“We were supposed to have a boat ride to Lover’s Beach or I was going to ask her walking along the beach,” Fick says. “Instead, I asked in the room, in the middle of a hurricane – and she said yes.”

Both say that certainly there was some fear about how they would make it out of the disastrous situation. But distress now behind them, Duke adds, “And I still say yes.”

Yet the hurricane wasn’t over yet. That night neither of them slept very well. They expected the windows to blow out and were ready to take shelter in their bathroom if necessary. The windows held up in their room but the roof did leak and soak their floor. Rooms on the other side of the hotel had windows broken and lower floor rooms were flooded. Exterior resort walls were shredded, too.

A flooded hotel room on one of the lower floors of the hotel where two County employees were staying when Hurricane Odile hit.Hurricane winds shredded exterior walls of the resort hotel.
“You don’t really know the damage going on outside until it’s light out,” Duke said. At daylight, they looked out and “there’s just destruction. Palm trees snapped in two or uprooted. The ocean water is polluted, muddy; the whole resort is trashed, flooded and underwater.”

Initially, there was no information, and resort staff had abandoned the hotel and the guests. The couple was unable to communicate with their worried family and friends to tell them they were fine and to get news.

“The cell tower went down,” said Fick. The resort was posting information on its site saying that guests were all safe and being taken care of, but that wasn’t true, said Duke.

That first day, someone from the hotel returned and offered guests bottled water—there was no running water – a rather unappetizing sandwich and overripe bananas. They waited in a line with 2,000 other guests including babies, elderly and sick guests. Other than that, there was no food. Guests learned the airport had been destroyed and there was no way to leave because of the flooding. They were lucky to have a hotel room to return to. Others had to hunt for dry places to sit and sleep.

The next morning, the flooding had receded a little. They saw some people carrying bags and walking through a field and decided they had to try to get out. They gathered their luggage and walked through mud, through a herd of horses, and a shanty town of destroyed homes. When they got to a main road, they found locals looting a convenience store and they decided to turn back.

The couple banded together with two other couples for safety. They were able to find a candle to use that evening which was helpful since they were hearing reports of looting at the hotel and people being robbed for their passports.

More damage from Hurricane Odile.There was still no food, but Fick and Duke had a cooler of frozen fish from a fishing excursion they had been on before the storm hit. So, they made a barbecue out of a trash can and a steel grate and fed 10 people with their haul.

On the third day after the storm, some guests were talking about getting chartered flights out of the airport. Fick says they had to try to go to the airport even if they ended up stranded there instead.

“People were starting to get real sick because of all the water. It was stagnant, and there were mosquitos everywhere,” Fick says. “It was going downhill fast (at the resort). You could hear people getting sick, coughing and hacking.”

He and the group they were with headed back out to the main road with their luggage. One other couple was from San Diego too and they spoke Spanish, which helped them immensely. They were able to flag down a taxi and the driver told them he’d heard emergency flights were coming into the Cabo airport.

When they got there, there were about 3,000 people all waiting for a flight out. Not to be discouraged, they waited and two hours later, they were on their way to Guadalajara with the other San Diego couple. They booked the last hotel room at a hotel in town and split it with the couple.

After being stranded for three days, Emily Duke sees a chance to escape the battered region on an emergency flight.
Finally, when they landed, their phones nearly “exploded” with texts.

Fick says he texted one of his daughters from a previous marriage to tell her they were fine and asked her to notify others. Duke texted her mother and asked her to do the same, then they started calling airlines to try to find a flight home from there.

The next day, they all got on the last flight out of Guadalajara to the U.S. It was 10 hours of travel time. Had they not been able to catch that flight, they were being told it would be another two days.

“We waited until we got home and then told our kids first, and then our parents,” says Duke about the engagement. Then she posted the happy news on Facebook.

But while they were fairly fortunate in their experience, Duke says she is sympathetic to the locals.

“It was going from where we were on the coast to the airport where we saw so much devastation. Homes were just demolished,” says Fick.

Duke adds, “For us, it was really horrible to be staying in it for a few days, but they’re living in it.”