Death Comes With a Roar as Hillside Collapses

It sounded like a roaring river, neighbors said, as it hurtled down the hillside, mowing down the house occupied by Isabel Partida, 71, and her 34-year-old deaf son, Cuathemoc, killing both early Tuesday.

The avalanche of mud, stones and debris traveled so fast in the Canyon Yucatan area just south of Tijuana’s center that nothing could be done for the victims, who were asleep in their bedrooms when the slide struck. By the time neighbor Francisco Sarabia rushed to the site, the house that had hugged the side of the steep canyon for 30 years was nothing but a heap of rubble. Even with the aid of a backhoe, it took paramedics five hours to retrieve the bodies.

“We all came to try to get them out. Fifteen minutes later, the rescue team came but there was nothing left to do,” said Sarabia.

The husband and father of the victims, Ignacio Partida, a retired Mexican army sergeant, was in a different part of the relatively large, four-room house when the slide struck at 12:45 a.m., and survived.

Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to have heard the sound of the rain-softened earth and stones sliding from a vacant lot 25 yards above onto the Partidas’ house in the barrio called Colonia Mexico. Within 15 minutes of the first mudslide, two more slides brought tons more earth down on top of the broken wood-frame home, obliterating it.

The avalanche swept up everything in its path. Twisted scraps of bedsprings, bicycles, two televisions and a washing machine littered the scene in its aftermath. Early Tuesday afternoon, the family dog sniffed around the ruins, not far from where relatives had placed a cross to mark the location where mother and son had died.

Next to the house’s remains sat an unscathed concrete block house that Ignacio Partida and his son were building and had nearly completed when their work was halted by the rains that began pelting Tijuana on Jan. 6. “They were friendly. They made no problems for anyone,” Sarabia said of the victims.

The deaths of the mother and son brought to 30 the number of people who have died in the storms south of the border since Jan. 6. Ten of those people perished in mudslides. And Tijuana officials have little hope that the agony is over.

The worst of the downpours may be over but authorities expect mudslides to continue in coming days because of the weakened geologic structure of the canyons where hundreds of thousands of Tijuanans live.

Canyon Yucatan alone, where Partida and her son lived, has seen half a dozen smaller slides since Friday. The slides hadn’t hurt anyone or caused serious damage--until early Tuesday.

“It just took a half-minute. It sounded like a very strong river with rocks and breaking wood and mud,” neighbor Alvaro Granados said. “I screamed for them to bring help but when I was on the phone, the other two avalanches came.”

Sarabia’s adjoining house was saved from the avalanche by a big yew tree that diverted the dirt and stones. Last Friday, a small avalanche had emptied tons of mud and stones into his back yard. Despite the danger, Sarabia said he was staying put in his house.

“I don’t have any place to go. I just hope it stops raining,” Sarabia said, clustered by his four small children.

Several--but not all--homeowners in the Yucatan Canyon neighborhood had been advised by government officials to leave their homes. But few if any left, said Maria Concepcion Ramirez, partly because the 40 or so shelters that have been set up to accommodate the roughly 5,000 Tijuanans left homeless by the floods are full.

But Ramirez, whose house sits above the Partidas’, said there is no way she is moving back. She fears that her home could slide away too because the ground below and around her house is “opening up,” she said.

“We are on the street now,” Ramirez said. “Where are we going to go? I didn’t take my possessions out of my house because, where will I take them? I don’t have any place.”