Costa Maya Before Dean
Concrete Cruise Ship Pier Destroyed
Total Devestation
Mike Hopson has posted an update on the status of Costa Maya and it isn’t pretty. The before photo is his and the post-Dean photos are Mexican newspaper scans. Mike’s update:
The (normal) pictures are from a trip we made there a few years ago, Mahahual was a boom town with the new “Port Costa Maya” cruise ship terminal just installed, and it was growing from a sleepy fishing village of 300 people, to a small town to support the cruise ship port.
The pictures and the story say the town is gone, the few remaining buildings will have to be demolished
My pictures were taken in the same location as the news papers! The paper (and other sources) say’s the entire town was “forcibly ” evacuated by the military before hand, and no one was lost.
It seems that everything in the direct path of this storm, near the coast at least, was destroyed:
What we do know is this: The latest from Costa Maya is that more than 50 percent of the pier has been destroyed by Dean. Rebuilding will required a multi-million dollar investment, and it will be a minimum of six months before cruise ships will return to the port. We’ll know more about the fate of the area as residents, business owners and government crews return today to assess the damage.
And now, courtesy of Julie Minter, we have more details — this time on the nearby fishing village of Majahual. Just a five minutes cab ride from the pier at Costa Maya, the little town has become a popular destination for lunching, beach bumming and souvenir shopping. In her first-hand account of Hurricane Dean’s impact on the areas outside of the actual Costa Maya resort, Minter tells Cruise Critic that the overall scene is quite grim.
“From the new light house all down the town of Mahahual, it is no longer Mahahual, everything is gone!” Many of the local businesses, she tells us, including restaurants, souvenir shops and dive shops are gone, with only a few buildings spared. Minter notes that “busted glass, water and wind damage is seen all over … houses are left in pretty bad shape. It is a shame that not everyone knew or got to visit this beautiful well kept secret that we knew as ‘our private paradise,’ our little island.”
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August 23rd, 2007 at 11:09 am
Carnival of Hurricane Relief, #102…
This is the 102nd Carnival of Hurricane Relief. Topic: Hurricane Dean.
The first was hosted by Glenn Reynolds at the urging of Hugh Hewitt with the support of N.Z. Bear in direct response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coas…