Hurricane Patricia image from weather.com
I left Puerto Vallarta just in the nick of time! Just a couple of days after I left, we started hearing about Hurricane Patricia in the Pacific. It quickly grew to a Cat 4 on Thursday, so my office had to get cracking. We planned to send crews down there on Friday morning before it made landfall, but Patricia quickly grew to a Cat 5 and we opted not to send our people into harm’s way. Long story short, Mission Mexico sent about 35 people down to the affected area early Saturday morning in anticipation of lots of Amcits needing evacuation or other kind of assistance. Most of those folks were either from our office or passed through our office en route, so there was a lot of coordination to be done. John, my boss, and I – along with lots of other folks – worked in the office pretty much non-stop from 6AM Friday morning until Sunday afternoon. Luckily, Patricia went south of Vallarta and didn’t hit nearly as hard as expected, so all of the teams were able to return either Sunday or Monday. It was a crazy weekend, but I learned a lot about disaster assistance.
The rest of the week is kind of a blur. I was happy Sunday morning to get in a workout in the gym, because it was impossible since last Thursday. I look forward to getting back into my routine!
Thanks to everyone who called or emailed to check on John and me. Guadalajara had some rain, but I think our friends in San Antonio got it worse than we did.