cozcharlie
Contributor
Apologize in advance for this meandering post (parts of which are probably addressed in other posts )
Kind of obvious when you think about it, but sliding doors and sliding windows have been key points of water entry in my building also. One thing that seems to help is putting towels in the tracks on inside. Will not keep water from getting in but reduces the volumes since the wind sometimes literally blows water through the tracks into the room. Obviously towel not going to help much for ground floor sliding doors if it is actually flooding
We also had some people use some temporary caulk. It is supposed to be easy to remove (“zip away “). We will see, sounds like it is used a lot in drier cold climates (exact opposite of Cozumel ). Just leaving it where it is given we are almost 2 months from end of hurricane season. Haven’t tested how effective it was blocking water/wind given most people used on east facing windows given that is where water came in from Gamma.
Delta was almost 180 degrees opposite with west wind given center passed north of us . Very glad about that generally because it probably saves us 20-30 mph in wind speed given the storm came through moving 16-17 mph and we caught the weak side since it went north. There was implicit trade off since west winds obviously were not good for wave action; but since it was moving fast waves didn’t have as much time to build up (or more time to just pound on the west coast ).
Still so, so glad storm weakened and went just enough north. If it had come in at 155 mph as was the forecast 12 hours before would have been real mess Given we caught clean side I doubt we hit a 100mph sustained but haven’t seen any official wind reports from the island I think the fact it was raining so heavily at the time of peak wind is why we had the damage we had. It always rains heavily with hurricanes, but on satellite it just looked like the worst rain in the entire system within a few hours of landfall was over San Miguel area and north end of the island where 90 percent of the people live ). Wind is bound to carry a lot more force when there is a lot of water in it
Once again , will gladly take this result. With regards to trees(more than 1,000 down in streets and power lines according to mayor) , I think the fact the ground was saturated from Gamma made the trees more likely to blow over since wet ground isn’t as good of an anchor for roots. They have noticed that correlation on island before. The people here did an impressive job of clearing most of these trees quickly.
Most of the people who lost power got it back by last night btw. At one point 40 percent were without power according to the mayor , but not certain if that was absolute bottom They were shooting to get 70 percent of the outages fixed by last night and I suspect they achieved their goal
mayor’s twitter account
[Pedro Joaquin D. (@PedroJoaquinD) on Twitter]
PS. Power came back on in my condo up north at 1:30 yesterday I had a little water on the floors from windows (3-4 beach towels worth ). Don’t think I posted that yesterday
