Hello I’m Chris. I went on holiday, sat through a force 5 Hurricane and now I'm a climate scientist

I have been thinking how to say hello and say something interesting. Well something happened a few years ago that seems to have largely defined who I am now and seems worth telling. So here goes.

In 1996, I graduated with a degree in Environmental Science with high hopes of making a career out of it. Fast forward a year and I’m working in I.T. fixing computers. Now I’m not knocking it as a profession, but it wasn’t what I really expected or wanted to do with my life. Being a engineer and fixing broken things, to those who know is actually enjoyable, but it always seemed to be bringing things back to zero. I wasn’t introducing anything new to the world.

But whatever right, I carried on doing it for ten years...as you do. But I eventually decided enough was enough and had to take some time out.

I booked a 3 month trip to Mahahual in the southern Mexican Caribbean sea, just north of the border of Belize. Nice! I would be a volunteer scuba diver collecting research data on the Costa Maya coral reefs. Even nicer! Here's me.....there.

So after six weeks my general life outlook was obviously improved. I won’t bore you with the details but you can imagine.

So one Saturday afternoon, out of the azure blue the Mexican army showed up in two flatbed trucks. We were told in no uncertain terms we had half an hour to get our shit together and come with them, no arguments. They had guns and everything (I’m British, even toy guns freak us out).

We were informed that category five Hurricane Dean (image below) was going to make a direct hit on Mahahual, full force within 24 hours. We were being evacuated to a nearby hurricane shelter to sit it out.

An hour later I was walking into a local converted school and being interviewed by Mexican TV. This was not long after Hurricane Katrina, it seemed the Mexican authorities really wanted to make sure there weren’t any fuckups.

The hurricane was going to arrive at 2 in the morning. At 8 pm the men were separated from the women and locked into separate classrooms with an armed soldier, and told to sit it out. They would come and let us out when it was safe. Nobody really slept. The Hurricane hit noisy and hard. I remember looking through a crack in the wooden panels over the windows and seeing water just swirling around in the air. The rain didn’t seem to be hitting the ground.

At 9 the following morning we were let out and after a few days were able to return to our paradise beach home, or so we thought.

When we got there most of it was just.......gone. The storm surge had reached the third floor of the main building, tossed a two tonne truck 100 yards into the mangroves like it was a toy, and our two dive boats were somewhere offshore, up the coast, who knows.

One thing that did survive was a small stray puppy that had knocked around the camp a week before we left. I have no idea how that dog made it, he’d survived the storm, and been out there for almost four days. He was found hungry and wet, tail wagging, underneath a metal box and was instantly adopted by one of my companions. She eventually took him back to the UK.....awww

We were then offered a choice, either leave the area or stay and help out with the relief effort. Every single person that had been there with me those first six weeks stayed. What started out as an extended jolly, had most definitely turned into something different.

We worked the next month driving round the region helping out where we could. Rebuilding homes, clearing trees. There was standing water everywhere and flies and mosquitoes like I'd never seen. Like the earth had died. Hurricanes make a big ass mess.

I remember walking through a completely flattened Mahahual and speaking to a man with a short piece of damaged wood in his hand.

“This is all that is left of my home”, he said. “What are you going to do”, I asked.

“Rebuild...carry on...what else can you do” he said with a smile on his face.

Honestly that happened.. I didn’t make it up.

To to cut a long story short, I returned to the UK, retrained and now I work as a climate scientist looking at the effects of hurricanes on nearshore infrastructure. Maybe I'll talk more about it in my next post. Its difficult to say what is going to happen over the next 50 years due to climate change. But the consensus is when hurricanes come they are likely to be getting bigger, fatter and stronger.

I have lost touch with everyone who I sat with in that classroom. So this is for them.

Cheers

Chris