Americans Trapped in Cabo After Odile Describe Desperation, Danger
Hurricane
Odile mangled Mexico’s Los Cabos resort five days ago, and in its wake
left a wasteland: Waterlogged hotels, scarce resources and tourists —
including hundreds of Americans — desperate for any scrap of reliable
information and the fastest flight home.
By Thursday, about
15,000 tourists out of an estimated 30,000 had gotten out of the ravaged
resort, Mexican officials said, with a handful of American airlines
among those resuming flights. The U.S. military has since gotten
involved, and the U.S. State Department said Friday that more than 500
Americans were put on four charter flights home in the past 24 hours.
One military plane
carried about 40 Americans from Cabo San Lucas to Los Angeles early
Friday, and they were charged $570 each for the ticket out, a defense
official told NBC News.
Others, frustrated by
the slow pace and worried over the chaos and looting in the storm’s
aftermath, didn’t wait for help to arrive.
“We were told military
was going to come and pick us up from the hotel, but they never did,”
Matt Milletto, of Portland, Oregon, told NBC News by telephone from
Mexico. “They told us no flights were going out of Cabo. Tourists were
panicked because there was no news and no direction. No organized aid.
Some military presence, but not a lot of leadership and order.”
Milletto was so
desperate to get home that he and his wife hitched a ride on the floor
of a minivan, and eventually traveled 300 miles to Loreto, where they’re
scheduled to take a flight out Saturday on Alaska Airlines.
“Cabo is in
desperation,” Milletto added. “Every building has windows blown out,
it’s complete destruction. I’m mostly concerned for the people who live
there. People are stealing, people don’t feel safe.”
Alexa Corcoran
Other Americans who managed to make it out echoed the dire circumstances.
San Francisco executive Jim Benton went to Cabo with 35 of his tech
companies’ top performers for an “all-stars event.” By the end of their
hurricane-stricken trip, they called their experience a “life or death
version of ‘The Amazing Race’” and “Cabo-geddon.”
Tuesday night — two days after the ferocious Category 3 storm struck
— became Benton’s breaking point. They were down to their final day of
clean water. Cell service was dead. There were warnings that looters
were planning to hit up the hotel.
His group split up, and by Wednesday, he and three others were able to catch the last AirTran/Southwest flight out.
At the crowded and
crippled Cabo airport, Benton said, he saw two American officials
helping tourists, and was startled by the stark contrast of the Canadian
government, which personally dispatched officials to hotels to help its
citizens.
Autumn Bremer, of Fort
Bragg, California, who was stuck in Cabo with her husband and two young
children, wondered the same: “If the Canadians were able to get their
people out Tuesday, why weren’t the Americans there?”
With a 1- and 3-year-old
to worry about, Bremer was left going from hotel to hotel to find food
that they could stockpile and clean water for bathing. They finally made
it out of Cabo on Wednesday afternoon before getting an Interjet flight
to California via Mexico City.
“It’s a complete
humanitarian disaster down there and [U.S. officials] are doing nothing.
Where is all the aid? You have Americans there still,” an exasperated
Bremer told NBC News before heading home.
Matt Milletto
Alexa Corcoran, a student
at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had heard rumors that the
military was helping Americans out of Cabo San Lucas, but in the chaos
it was impossible to separate fact from fiction.
What will stay with her, she said, was the devastation she saw on the way to the airport.
“Everything had been
destroyed,” Corcoran said. “I didn’t see one building in town that had
been OK. Everything there had been completely damaged.”
Mark Brinda, of
Brooklyn, New York, was on his annual fishing trip to the Baja
California peninsula with his father and friends when Odile caught them
flat-footed. Traveling through Cabo to get to the airport, he saw “very
little police presence, people getting robbed. ... 100 percent of the
locals are screwed. The houses are wiped out.”
He’s been going to Baja for the past 20 years, but this may be his last, he said: “I will never go back to Mexico.”
NBC News’ Courtney Kube contributed to this report.
Erik Ortiz
Erik Ortiz is a staff writer at NBC News. He covers national and breaking news, and joined NBCNews.com...
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NBCNews.com - 22 hours ago
Hurricane Odile mangled Mexico's Los Cabos resort five days ago, and in its wake left a wasteland: Waterlogged hotels, scarce resources and ...
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