Lessons of past disasters helped Mexico face Patricia: New York Times

The Mexican authorities learned from past and sometimes disastrous experiences in order to deal with hurricane Patricia, as expressed by the New York Times in an article signed by William Neuman and Elizabeth Malkin.

The daily points out that meteorologists called Hurricane Patricia one of the most ferocious ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. But just hours later, the storm had passed over and, despite uprooted trees, landslides blocking some roads and the destruction of humble homes, there were no immediate reports of any deaths or damage to major infrastructure.

Experts said that the result was a combination of luck — the storm, for instance, passed between two cities but hit neither directly — and capable planning in a country that had learned from past disasters.

The Mexican authorities “learned some hard lessons” from botched or inadequate responses to earlier catastrophes, said Richard Olson, the director of the Extreme Events Institute at Florida International University in Miami. “It looks like they got this one right.”

The Times points out that Mexico now has a national emergency response system that reaches from the central government to the local level. “There was a strong learning curve and they put resources into it,”  Olson said, although he said the system was not able to prevent deaths when separate storms hit the country’s Gulf and Pacific coasts in the same week two years ago.

With Hurricane Patricia, Olson said, Mexican authorities had done a good job of warning local residents, through announcements on radio and television and social media. He said they had also done good work in evacuating people ahead of the storm — a process that began before it quickly blew up into a Category 5 hurricane with winds measured at 200 miles per hour.

The authorities were then effective in moving some of those who remained in the area into shelters and persuading others to stay in their homes. In some cases, emergency management workers took to the streets with bullhorns to warn people of the coming storm.

“The important thing is that people responded,” Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, the secretary of communications and transportation, said in a televised news conference on Saturday. “If we hadn’t had that response, I’m sure we would be talking about other incidents.”

After the storm, the Mexican authorities also moved quickly to clean up debris and clear highways of landslides or fallen trees, points out the Times.