7 Days 4 Wilma

jerome@studiotime.us

Start Date of Trip: Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Destination: Cancun, Mexico
Purpose of Trip: Documentary Photo Shoot
Accommodations: Crown Paradise Hotel

Traveling Companions:
Jerome Hamilton - Photographer/Executive Producer
Alan Smith - Photographer
Walter Marin - Videographer/Video Producer
Ricardo Archambaud - Videographer
Sherina Archambaud - Production Assistant
Joe Appleton - Photographer/Production Grip
Stephanie Appleton - Model
Kai Powers - Model
Ashley Watkins - Makeup Artist

Day 2

Friday, October 21, 2005

The staff served breakfast about 7 AM.  After breakfast, a family of four and a boyfriend/girlfriend couple moved out of our room.  After I finished breakfast I decided to take a walk and get what exercise I could.  With a camera in hand, I could barely walk the hallway.  People were lying just a foot apart, up and down the hallway.  As I passed each room I glanced in to see if living conditions were better than what I had experienced through the night.  The winds and rain now pounded on every window in the building.  At least fifty percent of the windows were leaking water now.  The staff was growing weary from mopping for almost twenty-four hours.  The cooks began fixing lunch.  We had a bar setup that had a constant supply of juice and water.  As I walked to the end of the hall and approached the stairs, I noticed that a family of eleven had occupied the landing and were sound asleep.  Now twenty-four hours at the shelter, one of the managers, Mario, made this announcement:  “The hurricane…Wilma…is now a Category 5, and the winds are exceeding 220 mph.  Wilma is 55 k – 30 miles wide – and is said to encompass all of Cozumel at this time.  Wilma is only moving about 4 mph and may keep us here a little over forty-eight hours.  Our concern for your safety is first.  This shelter is only set up to last forty-eight hours total.  At this time we will be cutting off the air conditioning to conserve the supply running the generator.  Thank you for your patience.”  Once the air conditioning was cut, the whole compound began to heat up.  A few people sleeping next to the door in our room shut the door to keep the room inside as cool as possible.  The group just outside the door kept opening it and we kept closing it.  This went on until tempers began to flare.  There was yelling back and forth for ten minutes, then there was a last slam of the door.  It took only a few hours for our room to start heating up, then we remembered that all the fans were set up in the hallway when the air conditioning was shut off.  So now the whole game started again in reverse.  As we opened the door the group outside would slam it shut.  This went on for a couple of hours until we all got tired of it.

The winds at this point were 220 mph gusts and we could hear it pounding on the shutters, windows, walls, and ceiling upstairs.  A few windows had cracked and only one broke.  Water was coming in from every direction – cracks in the windows, window panes, ceiling, floor, etc.  The windows seemed to flex three, four, maybe five inches in and out.  Water sprayed in like we were going through a car wash with the windows halfway open.  Everyone was now trying to contain the water.  Staff and hotel guests were all working together, using towels and blankets to sop up the water.  Teams of two grabbed opposite ends and wrung out the water into trash cans.  Windows started to flex to the point of no return.  Management and maintenance decided the windows needed to be reinforced.  Two by fours were cut two inches longer than the window sills and then hammered into place.  Towels were wrapped around the 2 x 4’s to give the glass something to push against in the hope that additional windows would not break or crack.  After about 75% of the windows were fixed in this manner, everyone noticed that the hallway window frames were starting to work loose.  The staff now decided to take 8’ banquet tables and nail them straight to the wall.  In order to do this, the drop ceiling was basically busted to pieces with the hammers, allowing space to stand the tables on end.  About five or six tables were nailed directly to the concrete walls in both the upstairs and downstairs hallways.  In the midst of this confusion, an updated announcement was made: “Hurricane Wilma is moving very slowly even though it is a Category 5.  We might have to stay here over forty-eight hours; it might be three days.  We are going to have to limit the portions of food and start to ration the water supply.  Outside flooding is now extreme and all plumbing will be shut down.  Please help us keep everyone safe and we will go back to the hotel as soon as possible.”

The shelter was flooding, we were cutting back on food and water, the toilets had no plumbing, and the temperature felt like it was 100°F.  Feuding was loud among families, friends, and strangers.  Even our group was starting to bicker.  Some in my group were blaming me because I was the one who planned and set up our trip.  Finally I got tired of being bitched at, so I decided to move out and Walter came with me.  With very little space available, we found a sitting spot on the stairs below the landing.  We made new friends with the family of eleven that was sleeping there.  Their group was made up of a set of grandparents, a brother (16 years old), two sisters, their spouses, and their children, two boys and two girls, respectively.  One of the husbands worked in Iraq and explained that he saw this type of thing every day.

It was getting late but the cooks started to fix dinner.  A group made up of management, staff, and a few hotel guests, sat around a radio and listened to the broadcast until static drowned everything out.  That was the last communication we had with the outside world for the day.

 The only thing now was to sit and wait.  After dinner, things started to calm down.  The winds and the rain continued to pound on the shelter as if there was an intent to crumble our building.  The staff continued to mop and squeegee the water as much as possible.  The floors throughout the shelter were wet.  A few people had slipped and fallen, but there was yet to be an injury.  I tried to nap in my sitting position on the stairs, and Walter found a spot next to the people at the bottom of the stairs.  When the floor became too wet to sleep on, they pulled files out of a filing cabinet and threw them on the floor.  This soaked up some of the water and it gave them a place to lie down for a couple of hours.  They had wake up every so often and throw more files on the floor as the water soaked through.  About the time I started to nod off, there was a loud beating on the main door followed by screams.  There were people out there…what were they doing outside in the storm?  Management and staff stood guard at the door as the group outside yelled that the shelter they were in was coming apart.  “Please,” they begged, “Let us in!”  Knowing we couldn’t spare the room, much less food and water, management turned them away.  We watched as they ran off to try their luck at another shelter.