Above and Below San Juan Cosala

A longtime professional photography and videographer, Kelly loves to roam around with his camera, a Canon S5IS Powershot. Here are pictures from two different walks he took from our home in San Juan Cosala.

Last September, the mountains above the town were hit by a huge amount of water in the form of incredibly heavy rain, a waterspout or tromba of water from nearby Lake Chapala. Here, our friend Jack picks his way through a much changed landscape in one of the arroyos in the mountains.

Another day, Kelly caught this action along the lake shore.

More Photos of the Waterspout Day

I recently got a link to a set of photos on Flickr that were taken on Sept 12, 2007, the day that the waterspout (tromba in Spanish) hit our town of San Juan Cosala. I just browsed through them, and found a lot of fascinating details:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49882128@N00/sets/72157602062311039/

I've posted this next link before, but it seems handy to have it with the other one...here are the photos on Flickr that my husband Kelly took, on Sept.12 and later, regarding this amazing event:

http://flickr.com/photos/kellyhart/sets/72157602013524791/

Two Houses, Weeks after the Waterspout

This was a very nice house before the waterspout came to San Juan Cosala on September 12. Recently Kelly went for a walk to see how things were coming along. You can see how high the mud had come on the walls. Since then obviously a lot of cleanup has taken place, as you can see the steps. Kelly remembered seeing a woman emptying mud out of that window a month ago.


Here is a humbler house, lower down the hillside and somewhat to the west. Again, you can see the mud line.
This is the back of that second house, with boulders still indoors. We don't know the owners and don't know if they will be able to do anything with the structure or not. They are living elsewhere.

San Juan Cosala Orphanage: Ninos y Jovenes

San Juan Cosala has an orphanage which has been in existence for many years. In the recent waterspout storm, it took on a lot of mud and the -- about 140 of them, boys and girls both -- were evacuated for a while to the nearby larger town of Jocotepec. I understand that they are now all back. Mexican children are sometimes in orphanages even when one or both parents are alive, if the family is desperately poor or other circumstances mean that they can't provide the basics for the kids.

There was already foreign involvement in this place, typically just called "the orphanage," and there may well be more as a result of more of us learning about it from the recent events. This would be a very good outcome, as things are minimal there.

We live a few blocks from it, and Kelly took the picture above a couple of days after the storm. No damage shows, but the side towards the mountains was very muddy.

Concerned foreigners have started a website about the orphanage, with information and various ways (including PayPal) that you can donate. It's a great cause.

The orphanage was started by a much-loved priest here in San Juan Cosala, Father Beto or Father Macias, and he is still very much involved, along with other staff.

Visit the website: http://ninosjovenes.dojiggy.com/

An Old Timer Reflects on Waterspouts near San Juan Cosala

When this email by Gloria Mathai, who has lived in the Lake Chapala area since 1970, was forwarded to me by a friend, I wrote and got her permission to post it here on my blog. Gloria has seen a lot!

In my time here, there have been four serious trombas (waterspouts) in El Limon/San Juan Cosalá. The alluvial earth, when it's saturated, is unstable. That area was studied by ecologists in the 70's and deemed unsafe for building but, because of the gorgeous view, people acquired permits to build.

One week after one tromba hit high on the mountain in SJC,, my husband and I walked up the crusted river of mud. Looking for the path of least resistance, the river looked like a huge toboggan slide, up one side, down the other, carrying big trees by the roots. Rocks, the size of Volkswagons, were washed down and blocked the access road. Our friends couldn't leave their house for 4 days. They had a meter of mud throughout the house and the swimming pool filled. The huge vertical scar remained up the mountain for years.

In Mescala, east of Chapala, there was a killer (people drowned in their beds) that struck in the night and washed out the access road. People in Ajijic and Chapala sent canned foods and blankets in by boat.

In 1982 a small tromba hit our house in San Pedro Tesistan after taking off roofs of houses by the lake. It came up our boundry line breaking huge branches, sounding like a train, opened up the corner of our 2nd story studio and deposited chayote vines from the farm next door inside. We couldn't help but laugh when we saw it, the greenery hanging down prettily. Over 200 tejas (ceramic tiles) which capped our adobe garden wall just completely disappeared. We were fortunate to have such minimal damage.

National Geographic did a study of climates some years ago and declared ours are to be the 2nd best in the world! The 1st? Kenya, Africa. I feel I am fortunate to have lived here happily since 1970.

Conversation with Roberto Villa Lobos about San Juan Cosala and Waterspouts

Kelly and I got lucky when we hired Roberto Villa-Lobos last year. He's one of the most civic-minded people I know, and a great resource for us in learning about San Juan Cosala. He's worked for many years at the large balneario (hot springs) here in town, and his tasks include overseeing the crew caring for the pools.

He moonlights at our place, caring for our little pool, which as you can see above, took in some mud during the big storm. (He's got it almost fixed now.) Anyway, when he came by the first time after the storm, I had lots of questions for him. We speak in Spanish and he's quite good at understanding our fractured grammar. First off, I wondered about his experience because he normally arrives at work around 6 a.m.

"If I had been 10 minutes late, I don't think we would be having this conversation," he told me. "I could have been in the rockslide." He drives his truck along the highway, past the steep uphill road that is the main entrance to the Raquet Club, before turning downhill to go to work. He had already arrived, and so he was one of the relatively few people wide awake and out of doors when the storm hit just before dawn last Wednesday.

He was at the hot springs, when the rain became extremely heavy and loud. Then he heard a rumbling sound and saw the rockslide coming down that steep road from the Raquet Club. A lot of mud soon arrived at the balneario and went into some of the pools, which they were just about done cleaning up when I talked with him on Saturday.

"One of the Guadalajara weathermen on TV doubted that it was a waterspout and thought it was just from an accumulation of so much rain this year," I said to Roberto.

"I believe it was a tromba (waterspout)," he said. "It behaved like one, with that immense amount of water. And it was like the other two that I have been in, here in San Juan Cosala." The first one I think was in 1981 or so, and the second was eight or ten years ago. They were also early in the morning, and I think also in September."

He pointed up into the mountains behind us and showed me a couple of places where there were new slashes in the landscape that hadn't been there before. He thought the main hit from the waterspout onto the mountains had been perhaps half way up the mountains, which rise something under 4000 feet above us. That had given the rocks, trees, mud, and other debris roaring down the mountain in the water plenty of opportunity to pick up speed and carve out some new bare spots. The most dramatic new gash was long and vertical. Here is one that Kelly got a picture of:

This is a closeup, so you can't really see the context overall.

Roberto and I chatted more. He remembered one tromba had hit the town of Mezcala, east of Chapala, when he was a child some 35 years ago. (He's 45 now.) He recalled the adults in his family talking about it and saying that much of the town had been destroyed and many people had died.

"Gracias a Dios," he said, "that didn't happen here, even though this is the worst one we've had." He thinks it is dangerous up there in the mountains because of all the water and the instability.

I asked about his truck. He had had time, after the first rockslide, to move it from where it was parked in a low area directly in front of the balneario to further down the street on La Paz. That saved him from having to deal with water in its engine.

"What about Ajijic or Chapala?" I asked. He either said they don't have waterspouts or that they are rarer, I'm not sure which, because the mountains are not as close to the lake there. I asked him about the south side of the lake, and he said the moutains rise so gently that he had never heard of a tromba over there.

Photo and Blog Sources for San Juan Cosala and the Raquet Club after the Flooding

Here are all the links to blogs and groups of photos that I know of. If you find more, please add the link in a comment to this post. Thanks!

My husband Kelly has a lot of photos at flickr. Here is a link to all his waterspout-related pictures, both San Juan Cosala and the Raquet Club:
http://flickr.com/photos/kellyhart/sets/72157602013524791/

Another man, Steve Miller, took a lot of photos of the Raquet Club too.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shmiller/sets/72157601993828026/

Here are photos from a woman who lives in San Juan Cosala, in a part of town that got a lot of mud:
http://community.webshots.com/album/560684212

And thanks to reader Viki for adding these blogs in a comment. I've moved them up here, where they will be easier to see, and added some description.

http://www.mexico-insights.com/judysblog/blog.htm
Judy King is one of the most reliable sources of information on all aspects of life in the Lake Chapala region. From her monthly online magazine about the region to her weekly newcomer's seminars to her column in the Lake Chapala Review, and no doubt other things, she really has her finger on the pulse here. While I'm covering what we see and learn about here, she is a major source for a broader picture.

http://mainetomexico.blogspot.com/
Bill and Pixie Frayer live in Ajijic and have been reporting too.

http://www.chapalaforum.com/phpBB/
A place that people share news and rumors-labeled-as-news (see my rant about rumors in a previous post; this forum is probably no worse than other groups.) It was one of the first places I turned after the floods.

More Digging Out Photos from San Juan Cosala after the Waterspout

These photos were taken by my husband Kelly yesterday, September 13, as San Juan Cosala (by Lake Chapala) dug out from the mud and mess in the aftermath of the waterspout the day before, and we walked around our town.

I doubt I'll forget the word for mud: lodo.


Below is Calle Cardenal, just below the plaza, heading toward the coffeeshop we like so much, Cafetto Saga, and Lake Chapala.
Heavy equipment working on the carretera, the one highway in and out of town:

You're never too young to help out:

And grownups were busy too:


Aid and medical workers had a number of booths set up around the plaza. In the background, supplies await distribution under the Ayuntamiento (City Hall) porch. In the lower left there is a glimpse of some attractive new artwork recently painted on the cement.

Storm's Aftermath at the Raquet Club, San Juan Cosala

This afternoon, my husband Kelly explored the Raquet Club, camera in hand. It seems that yesterday's massive storm with a waterspout (a small twister filled with water from Lake Chapala) brought massive amounts of rocks, tree, and mud downhill, doing damage en route.

He's going to put up quite a lot of the images -- he took over 100 -- on flickr, and after he does, I'll post a link here.

The Raquet Club is a hillside development, very steep in places, on the east of San Juan Cosala. It was created as a development many years ago, but a lot of the houses are quite new.

Kelly noticed quite a few houses that looked totally fine, some with minor damage, some with major damage, and some that appeared too damaged to fix. Kelly has done a lot of building and remodeling over the years, so he had a good eye for such things.

He talked with various people in his meanderings. The most amazing story was told to him by a woman whose house was in really bad shape, with her car pushed and thrown into her house right where her bed was. A friend had encouraged her to spend the night away, for reasons not related to the storm. After she encountered a scorpion in her house, she felt like she would get herself out of there and she had left. So she wasn't there when the storm came, and this may well have saved her life. Kelly said to her that the scorpion seemed like a sign to leave, and she agreed.

Here are a few of the photos he took in the Raquet Club. He walked in, up what is usually the main Raquet Club entrance. It's quite steep and you can see that it is covered with rocks. Above him, people are approaching the guard house.


This is taken from above the guard house, looking down; it's steeper than it looks. While this side of the street seems drivable, the median is piled high with rocks, and the other side of the road doesn't show.




Kelly said that the house below appeared to be fine, but they've got a lot of rocks to remove.

This downed tree had come from up higher, as had the large boulder on this side street. The other side of the house looked much worse.


The man on the left and another man were shoveling mud out of this place.

San Juan Cosala, One Day after the Waterspout: Digging Out, Drying Out

Kelly and I walked to the plaza in San Juan Cosala a couple of hours ago, to see how things were looking since the waterspout dumped huge amounts of water on the hills above the town, before dawn yesterday. He has gone on to the Raquet Club to take pictures there... many of the photos on this blog, and all from yesterday, were taken by him.

We noticed that everything is drying out in the warm sunshine. Yesterday I splashed around in mud over the tops of my walking shoes; today, my plastic sandals are barely dirty.

The carretera has a few private cars but mostly dump trucks full of mud, heavy equipment, and emergency personnel. No buses are running. It's not officially opened yet, and I have heard conflicting stories about whether it is even physically passable by the entrance to the Raquet Club. Letitia had come over from Ajijic very early this morning to work at AMSIF, the women's organization that she is very active in, located in the Cultural Center in Ajijic. Maybe she got through before the heavy equipment started up, as someone from here who tried to go TO Ajijic later in the morning said that he couldn't even turn around to go back home for half an hour because of all the mud and heavy equipment at the main entrance to the Raquet Club.

The Raquet Club, an older development of dozens of home owned mostly by foreigners but also by Mexicans, goes up into the hills very high (spectacular views of the lake) on the eastern side of San Juan Cosala. We've heard that many of the houses there were damaged, and friends from there whom we just saw at the plaza in San Juan Cosala confirmed that quite a few were. One figure I heard (note this is not fact, just someone's guesstimate) is that maybe half the houses sustained some damage, including exterior free-standing walls.

We did hear from people who live there that they were told it would be a week or two roughly until the streets are restored, and nobody seems to know how long till electricity or water come back. If you have been trying to phone someone in the Raquet Club and they only have phones which require electricity, you may not reach them even if they are there and fine.

The plaza is the control center for all the help that has been amassed. There are boxes by the city hall, and numerous canopied tables with labels as to what they are. Lots of workers. I didn't see many people there who needed help, but I was told that the church housed about 150 people in a building by its side and that a school had housed 120. Plus there were two shelters in Jocotepec last night, where people from here were taken.

People who should know told me just now that no deaths have been confirmed, but there have been various injuries.

On my walk home, a 12-year-old girl I know begged me to teach her English, I bought dry cat food in a grocery store, said hi to various people I know by sight, and got a royal welcome from our 8-month-old Rottweiler who's still uncertain whenever we leave her. Life is getting back to normal.

Kelly or I will add photos and any more news later today.

Post-Waterspot Thoughts in the Night from San Juan Cosala

It began raining gently as we prepared for bed last night. Then it picked up a bit,and there was a little distant thunder. Kelly was soon sound asleep, but not me. The rain, with always such a sweet and welcome sound, had become enemy as well as friend.

I lay awake for hours, thinking, thinking. Those beautiful steep green mountains behind us seem to move over our house in my imagination till they formed a steep cliff, almost a tidal wave, ready to engulf us and the whole town.

I am no stranger to post-traumatic stress and caught myself here. Okay, you're over-reacting, I said to myself, really our house is not in the path of the arroyos. That was abundantly clear when we were out and about.

I still had personal fears off and on (What if we had to evacuate? Couldn't get all the animals in the Jetta... etc.) but as the hours passed, my mind moved more and more to the big picture. How many people here were wet, cold, or far more frightened than I about their futures? What would come out of this for San Juan Cosala, a town we've come to love, with its many resilient and deeply caring people?

I thought of the many millions of people all over the world who have lived through disasters of all kinds, whether they became the kinds of victims you see on the news ever so briefly, or the ones like us who were just there but not seriously affected. I was briefly grateful this hadn't been an earthquake.

Certainly nature has ever been erratic but I couldn't help but mull over the many ways that we humans have changed the face and the climate of the earth. I thought ruefully of my neglected website, simplegreenliving.com, that hasn't quite become a top priority for me. Maybe that will change sometime soon. I thought about the 8,000 mile road trip that Kelly and I had taken. We'd felt bad about the effect on the environment, and after we got home here, I found a website -- driveneutral.com -- where I could choose the distance driven and make and model of car, and make a donation to offset our carbon emissions. I had been suprised that the cost had been less than the cost of one tank of gas. Not that I recommend this approach as a reason to drive a lot, but we had felt better after making that small donation.

Finally, after my mind rattled on and on, and the rain subsided, I turned to prayer. I have recently been reading several books about quantum physics and how it ties in with the power of our individual awareness. I'd become so stoked that I'd registered yet another website, exploringinnerworlds.com -- nothing there yet but it too is rising up my list!

So I prayed and prayed, giving thanks, asking for guidance, and holding the situation here in San Juan Cosala in the Light. That's a Quaker phrase I have always loved (I became a Quaker during the Vietnam war) and my new readings of quantum physics made the phrase even more powerful. Feeling the Light in and around all of us, I finally slept... not long before Kelly woke up and was awake for hours doing his own inner processing.

San Juan Cosala and the Big Storm, Continued

We went down to the main highway, or carretera, where this picture shows mud, large equipment, people and trucks. We went several blocks along there, getting our shoes wet and muddy, in my case well over my ankles due to a bad guess about the roadway. After that I stopped worrying and walked anywhere.



We chatted with a number of people, including a friend of ours. He said that his grandparents had lost their house. It was this one that we had just walked past on the carretera:



Water was still flowing through it, though not a lot by this time. I asked where they were, and he said they had gone to the plaza, where bedding, food, diapers, and other things were being distributed. I wanted to go down there but it would have been quite a muddy walk and we decided not to.

We've heard that a number of people were hurt, but nobody we spoke to knew of anyone who had died, though there may have been some. No way to know from here at this point.

I asked several local people if this had in fact been a waterspout, and the consensus was yes. There was one some ten years ago in this area, but nobody remembered any since then.

I have been very impressed with the government response. Quite early this morning, a helicopter landed in our neighborhood and I talked with the two officials, who were there to assess the situation. They were able to tell me that San Juan Cosala had borne the brunt of the storm, though they hadn't yet been to Jocotepec to our west, where it was still raining. I heard the helicopter take off over an hour later, and in fact there have been helicopters around all day.

Here, a truck of firemen is following an ambulance which had come out from the city of Guadalajara to help. There are many, many firemen and other officials, as well as many local people, helping out. The general atmosphere is friendly. We've chatted with a lot of people in the streets.



Kelly and I feel very grateful that we suffered no damage. The night before this, we'd had a leak directly over my side of the bed, and I'd put a raincoat and towel over my spot and slept on the sofa until the rainstorm passed. Yesterday Kelly had been able to find and replace a broken tile that was the cause of the leak. Not a drop came through there this morning.

Well, that's about all I know at this point.

Water Spout Said to Hit San Juan Cosala, Lots of Damage

This morning around 5:30 it got to raining extra hard for a while. I was semi-awake, listening to the sound of the rain on our roof. It's a sound we've heard a lot for weeks now, in this unusually wet rainy season. I dozed off again. It was raining more lightly when we got up, and Kelly and I commented to each other on the roaring sound we heard, like a river nearby. We decided we'd go out with cameras a bit later. The ground was already saturated before this.

Then a young man we know came by to borrow our wheelbarrow and a shovel. He said a number of houses a little further west had been badly damaged and he'd be over there helping. (We live above the highway in San Juan Cosala, on the western side of the town.)

Our house and yard are just fine, other than a couple of minor leaks and some mud in our overflowing swimming pool. But once we started walking around, we realized that the river-like roar we had heard was indeed a river, albeit a temporary one, running down a street near us. People told us it had been a couple of feet deep.

Here, men help to dig out a truck as a its owner watches. (I'm behind her.)



Further down this street (Calle Vicente Guerrero Norte), there's an arroyo that comes into the street, normally quite a lot lower than the street. It had over two meters of debris completely blocking the street. The people walking down the street were in several inches of water.



The water coming down the street had met this debris from the arroyo and backed up to form a temporary lake on the street, which then flooded some homes up to about a foot. Here, shoes are drying out on a car:


We walked uphill to go see a house which had had its foundations were dug out from underneath it by the river of water coming down. We weren't permitted to get close enough to get any photos, but I did ask if the people were okay and was told yes.

So then we walked around more or less directly below that house to a new development, Yesterday, you would have seen attractively cobbled streets with sidewalks:



There's a tiny white speck in the hills to the right of the lampost. That's a waterfall that isn't usually there.

We had power early in the morning, lost it for a few hours, and then regained it. From talking with people on the street and with a couple of friends on the phone, I learned that there was heavy rain and flooding all along the north shore of Lake Chapala, but San Juan Cosala evidently had the worst of it.

Water Spout?

There is a phenomenon--relatively rare, I believe--where a waterspout of water from Lake Chapala comes over to the mountains and dumps its load... a LOT of water in a short time. It seems that this was the case between 5 and 6 this morning. The Raquet Club, which is east of us and generally higher up, evidently got quite a hit, but I don't know how many houses were affected. Some of the waterspout water may have also been what hit our area and further west.

I want to get this post up in case the power goes out again, will continue with more in another post shortly.