Floods Mean Death in Tijuana

As a wall of water crashed through their impoverished colonia 3 de Octubre neighborhood, Andrea Quintero helplessly watched her husband being swept away to his death.

“I saw [his] truck go tumbling in the water and my husband disappear,” Quintero, 30, said Monday, pain and horror still etched on her face. “He never yelled. I couldn’t believe what happened. I called out his name, but he didn’t answer.”

Shortly after 3 a.m. Sunday, a neighbor had awakened Quintero and her husband, Valentin Martinez Mora, 33, to warn them of the rising water that was racing down the normally dry gully that bisects their colonia.

Martinez was one of 13 people killed--six here and seven in Rosarito--by the floods that swept through Baja California on Sunday.

In Tijuana, it was the latest chapter in a perennial saga involving the city’s poor neighborhoods: violent and sudden death by water. There is a grim saying along the U.S.-Mexico border: When the big rains hit, people in San Diego get wet and people in Tijuana drown.

Many of the newer and poorer neighborhoods in Tijuana are little more than shantytowns built on the sides of canyons where the hills lack vegetation.

When heavy rain hits, torrents of mud can strike swiftly and ferociously, like those triggered by volcanic eruptions. Grief-stricken residents tell numbingly similar tales of watching as loved ones were carried off.

“Everything happened so quickly, in less than five minutes,” Quintero said. “My husband started the truck and was moving it to higher ground, but it stalled. Then I heard the water. It sounded like a giant train roaring through the colonia.”

By late Monday, 600 Mexican soldiers and hundreds of private and public agency relief workers were tending to the needs of hundreds of people seeking refuge in shelters here and in Rosarito. Heavy equipment from both sides of the border was mobilized to scrap away the tons of mud and debris that clogged streets.

Martinez’s body was recovered in about six hours, about a mile below the colonia, on Boulevard Diaz Ordaz, a busy thoroughfare. The couple, who own a corner grocery store, have three children, 8, 9 and 10.

“Things were just starting to get better for us,” Quintero said. “We had worked so hard to make our store a success.”

Colonia residents said a torrent about 100 feet wide and four feet deep swept down the canyon, leaving five vehicles, including Martinez’s Toyota truck, wedged under a concrete bridge.

In Rosarito, 20 miles to the south, Jorge Osuna, 50, told an incredible tale of survival. Most of Rosarito’s victims lived in hillside homes constructed along the Arroyo Guaguatay, located next to the toll road that continues south to Ensenada.

Leaning on a cane and looking battered and bruised, Osuna explained how he was yanked out of a pickup truck camper, where he was sleeping, by the raging water and deposited about half a mile down the hill, in the middle of the tollway.

“I tumbled head over heels for about 100 yards. Then the water just dragged me, on my back, my side and my stomach the rest of the way,” Osuna said. “I was too busy being scared to worry about dying.

“The next thing I know I’m laying on the highway, in the rain, at 3 a.m.”

Osuna’s neighbors in adjacent homes were not as fortunate.

Bertha Arroyo, 60, and her three grandchildren, Brandom, 3, Robin, 2, and Denisse, 4 months, were dragged out of their small wood-frame house as the flash flood roared through the adjacent gully. Their bodies were recovered about a quarter of a mile downstream.

Jose and Marta Alicia Vega said they watched as the woman and children were swept to their deaths. The couple and their young son escaped to high ground minutes before the water rushed through their neighborhood.

“It was the most traumatic of experiences, watching four people you know die before your eyes,” Marta Alicia Vega said.

The Vegas lost everything they owned. Friends, neighbors and Mexican soldiers were helping the family clean mud and debris from inside and outside their house.

“We’ve lost everything, including our house. Nothing can be saved. We have absolutely nothing left but our lives, and for that we are very thankful,” Jose Vega said.

Parked inside the Vegas’ fenced-in yard was a camper, facing the street as if someone had backed it into place. Jose Vega said the camper had belonged to his neighbor, Regino Vazquez Reyes, 65, who lived across the street and up the hill.

Vazquez died in the flooding. Jose Vega said the man’s camper was picked up by the raging water and dropped in his frontyard. Vazquez’s small house trailer was also deposited in Vega’s yard.

Amid the destruction, sunny skies buoyed Tijuana and Rosarito officials’ hopes that they had weathered the worst of the El Nino-influenced storms that were expected to hit California and Baja California this week.

“The situation is stable throughout the city. For the most part, public services remain uninterrupted,” said Antonio Rosquilla, director of the civil protection office in Tijuana.

Soldiers and civilian workers fanned throughout Tijuana and Rosarito clearing debris from roads and private property. Tijuana officials estimated that it will take about a week to complete the cleanup.

But there remained concern on both sides of the border that, unless the rainy season relents, the weekend death toll in Baja California could only be the beginning of a tragic winter reminiscent of 1992-93, the most destructive in recent Tijuana history.

In that winter in Tijuana, 14 people were killed, more than 5,000 were left homeless and the city was virtually paralyzed because of disruptions in transportation, communication and power. For relief workers and residents, the memory of that killer winter is still fresh.

“This weekend was very tragic, but it could get worse, like 1993, if the rain doesn’t stop for a sufficient time,” said Gayla Cooper Congdon, co-president with her husband, Scott, of the San Diego-based Amor Ministries. “With each rain, the danger gets worse, and more people are likely to die.”

Since 1993, Mexican authorities have relocated thousands of poor familiesfrom flood-prone areas and poured millions of dollars into drainage and flood control projects. Amor Ministries, which has worked in Tijuana for two decades, has built hundreds of homes for the city’s poorest residents.

Still, flooding and death continue to be an inexorable force of nature when the region experiences sustained rainfall.

One problem is topography. Much of Tijuana rests inside a natural bowl. Mudslides rip down the hillsides, carrying anyone and anything in their path, sometimes with such strength that automobiles are hurled like toys.

Another factor increasing the danger is Tijuana’s explosive population growth--upward of 6% annually--that continues to outstrip any improvements in infrastructure. Drawn from the poorest regions of the Mexican interior, new residents continue to arrive in hopes of finding work. Often they end up as squatters in shantytowns, the areas most vulnerable to flooding.

“When it comes to flood control, the name of the game is infrastructure,” said George Loveland, acting San Diego deputy city manager.

Many of the shantytowns carry names that bespeak the hopes that drive immigrants north. Three teenage girls were killed Sunday after a river of mud swallowed their car in a neighborhood called Mexico Lindo or Beautiful Mexico. (Sometimes the neighborhoods, such as the one where Quintero and Martinez lived, are named simply for the date in which the first dwelling was constructed.)

As the rain pounded his city on the weekend, Tijuana Mayor Jose Guadalupe Millan Osuna contacted San Diego Mayor Susan Golding and asked for assistance under the cities’ mutual aid agreement for natural disasters.

San Diego sent 10 dump trucks, four front loaders and a backhoe to Tijuana to aid with the daunting job of removing tons of mud from roadways, homes and commercial areas. Additional equipment will be sent if needed, officials said.

On Monday, as workers cleared away the debris, residents in Tijuana were left to grapple with the nightmare of what had just happened and their own powerlessness to stop it.

Isidro Michel Gonzalez, tried to save Martinez, his “compadre,” but gave up when “I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do.”

Michel, who lives two houses from Martinez and Quintero, said another neighbor tried to get in the water to save the drowning man.

“There were cars and boulders in the water, shooting like bullets,” Michel said. “If you didn’t drown, the cars and big rocks would kill you. We simply had to tell ourselves that what was happening was God’s will.”

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