Flood Season Brings Peril to Tijuana Hills

In a city where the multiplying shanties mock gravity as they spread up canyon walls, the safest way to ready some homes for winter rains is, simply, to abandon them.

That is the message city inspector Vicente Verduzco and his partner are spreading, shack by tottery shack, among the hilly recesses of Tijuana’s most inaccessible neighborhoods. With winter just underway, official concern over residents’ safety peaks in such areas, where heavy seasonal rains have combined with flimsy house construction and abrupt topography to sometimes deadly ends in recent years.

Last year alone, storm waters flowing down hillsides left 18 dead in Tijuana and nearby Rosarito. Officials evacuate homes facing imminent danger during floods or landslides but can only advise precautions before disaster strikes.

So the city has taken to personally warning hard-to-reach residents, many of them squatters who have thrown up makeshift structures on land that is unclaimed and often unsuitable for building.

“They never think about how dangerous it is. They’re exposing themselves and their children,” Verduzco said.

By four-wheel-drive truck and on foot, four inspectors fan out in search of precarious dwellings. They’re not hard to find. There are the houses that flood when the rutted dirt lanes instantly become powerful rivers. There are the huts perched atop sheer earthen walls. And there are the many houses propped up by stacks of old tires, their tenuous purchase all the more iffy when the rains come. Many of the dwellings are also inherently dangerous for other reasons, their lack of heat and solid walls leaving residents vulnerable to cold-related illnesses.

Thousands of homes, perhaps tens of thousands, occupy zones that the city’s civil protection department deems at risk because of location. On a map inside the department’s office, the zones are marked by red pins tracing the contours of the city’s famously rugged terrain. It is the year-round job of the four inspectors to put shoe leather where danger is greatest.

Armed with a clipboard and a stack of stickers, Verduzco and Horacio Ortega scramble across gullies, eyeball the flow of the land and water and survey which houses probably need help most. They chat up residents, checking off data such as the number of adults and children in the house and name of the owner. They may point out a specific menace, such as a landslide in the making, and then apply a wall sticker. Red recommends evacuation, yellow urges caution.

It is a Sisyphean task. The slapdash houses--built of tar paper, scrap wooden pallets, even discarded political campaign signs--go up faster than anyone can track. It is one measure of how many people from other parts of Mexico continue settling the city’s dwindling vacant land. The inspectors can visit perhaps 30 houses a day. They also know that few people will choose to vacate homes unless the government can offer them another place. It can’t.

“Every day more people arrive,” said Ortega, setting out to inspect dwellings near a flood-prone creek in a hilly zone called Camino Verde. “It’s terrible the situation we have in Tijuana.”

The pair gamely plug away at their uphill assignment, convinced that past warnings have saved lives. Humor also helps.

On a recent morning, Verduzco ended a chat with one skeptical hillside dweller with a teasing farewell: “In a month of rain,” the inspector said, “we’ll wait for you at the bottom.”

A History of Deadly Storms

That is more than a grim joke in Tijuana, where the same winter rains that snarl traffic or leak through roofs in California can assume fearsome colorings south of the border. Last winter, a string of El Nino-fueled rainstorms turned deadly as runoff cascaded onto city streets, overwhelming homes and swamping cars.

People speak in awe-struck tones of the terrifying floods of 1993, when at least 30 people were killed during torrential rains. After that experience, the city began the system of inspections. The idea has been to make a list of at-risk homes to help rescue crews locate them during emergencies and to make sure residents understand the perils of where they live.

Authorities say they have given up relocating denizens of the danger zones. The city lacks land for resettlement. And no sooner do officials move families out of a risky spot than dozens of other people arrive to replace them. In the past, settlers were even known to plop down in areas designated for evacuation in order to receive a free parcel upon relocation (a service no longer provided), said Antonio Rosquillas, the city’s civil protection director.

As long as newcomers skirt the shortage of affordable property by settling in dangerous spots, Rosquillas said, the pragmatic answer is to supply useful information: how to evaluate their homes, plan an escape, identify neighbors who may offer help. Spreading this advice is a challenge in areas where people lack mail delivery and probably don’t have televisions or don’t read newspapers to catch the advisories from City Hall. So City Hall, in the form of Verduzco and Ortega, goes to them.

On the recent morning rounds, the pair see all the things that make their job maddening: A family of eight living beneath a 50-foot wall of brittle-looking earth. (This one gets a yellow tag.) A house that sits at the confluence of two stream beds, both dry at the moment. (Yellow.) Another that is perched, improbably, 40 feet above an arroyo, thanks to dozens of tires that have been planted in the hillside. (Red.)

On this day, the pair also carry a more immediate wintertime warning. Two recent cold snaps have contributed to the deaths of 18 people--most of them 5 years old or younger--from respiratory ailments, a common seasonal plague here. As he surveys the housing, Verduzco amiably advises parents to keep their children properly blanketed against the cold and to seek medical attention at the first sign of illness. Officials expect more cold spells, and less rain, this year.

The inspections provide a ground-level view of some of Tijuana’s most vexing challenges, from exploding population growth to infrastructure that has been overwhelmed or neglected. Ortega, who clambers about in a pair of dusty wingtips, grouses about the squatters who colonize land they shouldn’t and then demand public services. He also faults the federal government for doing little to make the nearby creek flood-proof and clear of debris. In every direction the inspectors turn, new shanties are taking form.

Residents respond with quizzical looks to the idea of moving out. For Rosario Alcarez, the simple tar-paper dwelling she and her husband built two months ago represents a bonanza. The lot belongs to her brother-in-law, so the rent is free. That’s a key advantage over their previous home down the hill. Like many settlers, the couple came from elsewhere, the Mexican state of Sonora, three years ago.

At a neighboring house, laborer Jesus Soto explains how the 1993 flooding sent the family fleeing to higher ground to escape a torrent that burst inside and tossed piles of rocks and mud along the wall outdoors. The runoff, which muddies the street even when it’s not raining, makes it impossible to leave the house whenever storms hit. Still, the place is home for three families. No one plans to leave.

Some feel safe in perches above flood-prone waterways.

“It makes us afraid when you can see the arroyo filling up and filling up and then the road fills up,” said Maria Isabel Torres, whose wooden house sits on a 12-foot bank she has planted with succulents. “But being up high protects us.”

So far she’s been right. The house has stood 11 years.

It would be easier, of course, if the inspectors could predict where the next disaster will strike--which ramshackle houses will tumble, which will hang on. Instead, they make do, combing the vast city one arroyo at a time, with the few certainties that nature will provide.

“All we know,” said Rosquillas, “is where the water flows.”