Hurricane Dean has seen it’s first fatality today in St. Lucia.

CASTRIES, St. Lucia (AP)–A man drowned in a river early Friday as Hurricane Dean passed over the tiny Caribbean island of St. Lucia, police said, marking the first confirmed death from the storm.
Benjamin Bernard, 62, was attempting to retrieve a cow when he was caught in a rain-swollen river and swept away by the current, said Royal St. Lucia Police Force spokeswoman Tamara Charles. The death came as Hurricane Dean battered St. Lucia and neighboring islands and moved into the Caribbean.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires

Some of my friends here in Cancun have been making suggestions for hurricane preparation. I’ve complied their suggestions into a random-order list:

• Back up computers
• Charge laptop and cell phone batteries
• Charge rechargeable batteries and/or buy batteries
• Have mops, buckets and rags on hand
• Board or tape up your windows
• Unplug electrical appliances and move them to high ground
• Get as much stuff as possible off the floor
• Protect your important documents
• Buy cell phone credit
• Remove or secure garden furniture, fences, gates, potted plants, etc.
• Fill the bath, a kids paddling pool or buckets with water so you can flush the toilet
• Make sure you know your internet dial-up number for when your DSL or Cable modem loses power
• Fill bottles with drinking water and freeze them, later you can use the frozen bottles to keep you perishables cold longer, and you can also drink the water
• Fill car with gasoline
• Take cash out of the ATM
• Get some baby wipes and a big bottle of hand sanitizer for quick clean ups when you don’t have water
• Trim the trees and plants back so there’s nothing for the wind to throw around out there
• If you have a tinaco (water tank) on the roof make sure it’s firmly strapped down and is full of water when the hurricane hits
• Strap down your gas tanks so they can’t move in the wind, then shut them off before the hurricane hits, and check for leaks before turning them back on
• Crack open the windows on the leeward side of your building so that if something comes through a window the sudden increase in air pressure doesn’t blow out all the windows on the other side of the house
• Do all your laundry ahead of time
• Grind coffee so when the power goes out you still have freshly ground coffee, then find the non electric coffee maker

This list is not complete, but it sure is a good start for me.

Posted by RiverGirl

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It’s always interesting to me to observe how people react to the news that a hurricane might be coming to our town. Here’s some of the people I have encountered in the last couple of days….

The Head in the Sand-ers

-”So, you ready for Dean?”
-”Huh? Who’s Dean?”
-”Hurricane Dean, word is it’s coming this way.”
-”Huh? I don’t read the news, you mean today?”

The Head in the Sand-ers never seem to know anything about upcoming hurricanes (or elections or Britney Spears latest gaffufle). These are the people that will wait until the very last minute to buy supplies and are surprised when there are no batteries or candles left.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf-ers

These are the people who pooh pooh your simple hurricane conversation starter with “Ach, they ALWAYS say a hurricane is coming and it never does”. The BWCW-ers never stock up, never protect their houses and are always surprised when they find themselves soaking wet in their pyjamas with no shoes in a shelter with a hundred other people.

The Worker Ants

Perhaps the wisest neighbour of them all, they calmly go about collecting supplies, trimming trees and protecting their houses. Their motto is always “Better Safe Than Sorry”.

The Doomsday-ers

These people are not usually found in our neighbourhood, but on internet message boards, proclaiming the end of Cancun as we know it. Occasionally we find a real live person living here who freaks out, but they are usually new in town and easily calmed with a nice shot of tequila.

Luckily most of the people I know come from the Worker Ant colony, calmly preparing for what might happen. They do not ignore the possibility of the impending bad weather but they are not in need of a straight-jacket either. We do what we have to do to protect our families and ourselves, without a single “We’re doomed!” spoken aloud. Mr. Rogers would be proud.

Salud!—-CancunCanuck

Dean is now officially Category 3 status, with sustained winds of 125mph and gusts up to 155mph. Category 4 status is sustained winds over 131mph, so it may not be too long at all before this is achieved.

Posted by Steve

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My neighbors have begun to prepare their homes for Hurricane Dean’s arrival. All around me I hear that familiar sound of people drilling and hammering and cutting as they put plywood over their windows.

We have also started to prepare our own house. But we won’t be boarding up the windows. Honestly I think my claustrophobia would eat me alive if I could not see out the windows. But more importantly we replaced the windows in our home with grid-like windows that have many small panes of thick glass. So there’s a lot of structure to each window and not that much glass. These windows did beautifully during Wilma, no leaks, no shaking, nothing. So there will be no boards on my windows.

Instead, my major concern at the moment is that big fig (ficus) tree in front of my house which hangs over my driveway. Ficus trees are not native to the Yucatan, instead they are an invasive species which grows very well here. But they are very shallowly rooted trees and have a nasty tendency to flip over and smash your car during periods of high wind. One problem is that ficus trees do not lose their leaves in high wind, so that gives them a lot of surface area with which to catch the gusts. Our current discussion around here is just how much we should cut back the ficus, do we hack it to within an inch of it’s life, or to within half and inch of it’s life?

Stay tuned for more on my ficus tree drama.

Posted by RiverGirl

RiverGirl’s Blog

The 11am update doesnt paint any better picture for Cancun than previous updates. If anything, the trajectory is a little more northward and the tracking path puts the center of Dean closer to Cancun than preceeding predictions. The hope is that this tiny northward trend will continue and that by the time Dean is upon us it may well be out in the Yucatan channel. Indeed, that is exactly what one of the models is predicting. Unfortunately the others seem to be unanimous that Dean will make landfall in the Yucatan.

The hurricane has increased in intensity with sustained winds now up to 105mph and gusts to 125mph. A further small increase in wind speed will push it into Category 3 status, I wouldnt be surprised if it made it to to Cat 3 status later today. One other aspect of minor note is that the speed of travel seems to have slowed a little, resulting in the time it will affect Canucn being pushed back a little.

Posted by Steve

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Hurricane Dean causes it’s first damage as it hits the islands of St Lucia, the BBC reports :

The first hurricane of the Atlantic storm season is buffeting the islands in the eastern Caribbean. At 0900 GMT, the hurricane’s centre was in the St Lucia Channel between St Lucia and Martinique, heading westwards at 24mph (39km/h). Reports from St Lucia said power was down and many trees had been uprooted. Hurricane Dean, with winds of 100mph (160km/h), is currently a Category Two storm but US forecasters expect it to strengthen over the next 24 hours.

“Buildings are still standing, roofs haven’t come off,” David Wallace in St Lucia told a Miami television station.”But it’s devastating in terms of trees. Almost every tree is down here.”

“There is water in my house. There is water in my room. I don’t know what to do. Everything is shaking, shaking, shaking. It’s truly catastrophic,” a woman said in a phone call to Radio Martinique.

Guadeloupe, Dominica, Antigua, the British and US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico are next on Deans hitlist.

Posted by Steve

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