Peter and the wolf

Odile will be for long a watershed in Baja California Sur and mainly in Los Cabos. After so many years of waiting for a hurricane of this magnitude to landfall, Odile finally did and as Peter and the Wolf, he caught everyone completely off guard. It was not to go to the supermarket for canned and additional water or to cover our windows with plywood or lines of masking tape, but actions that had to be done long before. The construction standards should be stricter in an area susceptible to this type of natural phenomena but maybe the work of control and regulation is too big to local councils, so we, the professionals, should be the ones to establish a minimum quality in construction, trying to avoid any damage to people and their properties.

Lands End, Cabo San Lucas

The population of Baja California Sur are mostly a new and young group; proclaimed in 1974 as a Free and Sovereign State, it had a population of just over 160,000 inhabitants that in 2010 amounted to 637,026 people, quadrupling in just 36 years with an immigration that represents more than 40% and in the specific case of Los Cabos, almost the 60% according to the 2010 census.  This youth that characterizes us has certainly affected the historical memory and we only remember Hurricane Juliette in 2001 that landed in La Paz as a category 1, but we have no further reference of natural phenomena even when largest hurricanes in the last decade may have produced more problems for us, as Jimena in 2009, Norbert in 2008 or John in 2006.

The few native inhabitants of Baja California Sur or those who migrated to this state before 1976 will remember Liza: a category 4 hurricane with winds up to 220 km/h which exceeds category and winds of Odile and according to some historians, had more than 7000 dead (Morgan) only in La Paz, where she ​​landfall, busting a gabion which destroyed more than 30 whole colonies.

Thanks to the 1985 earthquake, Mexico City has one of the most stringent building regulations in terms of safety -obsolete unfortunately on issues of architecture and urban design- applying efficient structural coefficients for elements and facilities, originated "in the Mexican way" to little, to late. In the case of Baja California Sur and Los Cabos specifically, the situation is completely different because the tragedy didn´t produced yet legal regulations that have been applied long ago.  In this moment, our collective memory is lost after 38 years of what happened or newcomers are not aware of the risks we take for constructions without foresight, so we are not yet prepared for natural phenomena as Odile.

The use of windows with glass untempered or safety film, lightweight frames, prefabricated panels for floating and light facades, self-lifting covers, light construction systems and racks of non-structural steel, are just some of the building elements that suffered most damage during Odile in recent days, affecting the building heritage of the general population and not just their owners because with their detachment did seriously affected other properties. Now, considerable number of cases are being repaired by the same systems; if we bet on statistics and wait a hurricane within a decade is to bet again to destruction and collective panic that invaded us this time.

The opportunity we have today to launch Los Cabos again as an attractive destination for local and international tourism, is unbeatable. I dislike the term "rebuild" because of the connotation of destruction and in my opinion –in exception for some structures that had a bad choice of building systems that had serious injuries- Los Cabos is on and in just 15 days we can see that it has recovered and we are back to our routine. It is time to return to the source that motivates us all to continue working for this land and return to our traditions and Mexican architecture to offer a product that is not only strong against any natural phenomena, but a true reflection of who we are. Now is time for us to learn from our mistakes and grow with them for no repeating them again in 10 years from now and then suffer the consequences of our actions once more.

JPV

If you want more information on the data mentioned in the text or want to view the sources from which I have obtained them, you can go to the following links:

https://sites.google.com/site/historiabcs/huracan-liza

http://smn.cna.gob.mx/ciclones/historia/ciclones1970-2011.pdf

http://www.ugm.org.mx/publicaciones/geos/pdf/geos04-1/Martinez-Gutierrezetal.pdf

http://www.inegi.org.mx/