December 1, 2007 marks the end of another hurricane season in south Florida, and for the second year in a row we are blessed with a clean getaway. For now, we can exhale.
Yet more than two years after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, it’s anything but easy in the Big Easy.
In August this year I took a short vacation to Cancun, Mexico. The Yucatan peninsula is a locale I adore and have visited extensively before. But having lived in Florida for the past three years and having been through three hurricanes during that time, I had more than a fleeting sense of trepidation over the state in which I’d find my beloved Mexican Caribbean jewel. Recalling the damage an unexpectedly fierce hurricane Wilma did to South Florida in just a few hours on a late October 2005 day after ravaging Cancun for four times as long, I was prepared to see evidence of recovery still in progress. Prepared, at least, to spot more than a few blemishes on the face of the normally pristine hotel zone, and certainly prepared to see the aftereffects of the storm in the outlying, natural environment.
My expectations couldn’t have been more off. Judging by the looks of things, you’d never know there was a Hurricane Wilma which came on shore less than two years ago as a category four storm with winds exceeding 150 miles an hour. Between October twentieth and twenty-fourth, Wilma dumped over five feet of rain on Cancun, double or triple the amount that Hurricane Katrina unleashed on New Orleans only seven weeks earlier. While both storms peaked as category five hurricanes while over water, Wilma came on shore with much more force, and stayed much longer, than Katrina when it made landfall. Where Katrina hit New Orleans, it was a weak category three, if not a category two. Yet we’ve all seen the images of what happened in New Orleans and environs.
How then, do you account for the drastic differences in both the level of devastation and recovery efforts between the two cities? In digging for the answers to this question, there is much to be gleaned about the economic and political agendas of two North American neighbors, Mexico and the United States, and a critical lesson for Americans to learn as well.
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