When Hurricane Otis struck, Luz María Jiménez was sleeping at her 90-year-old neighbour’s place. Jiménez, 68, stayed over often because the elderly woman couldn’t always care for herself and was afraid to sleep alone. The storm decimated their close-knit community of less than 800 people in the municipality of Coyuca de Benítez, as rivers and streams burst their banks in the early hours of 25 October, unleashing devastating torrents of mud. Both reside in a small inland town called Cerrito de Oro, about 16 kilometres from the Mexican resort city of Acapulco, where Otis became the first Pacific hurricane ever to make landfall with maximum Category 5 intensity. As winds of up to 300 kilometres per hour ripped the metal sheets off their shack, Jiménez feared the worst. A muddy flow of water soon entered the house and flooded everything up to their necks. “I did my best to carry her, to keep her alive,” Jiménez told The New Humanitarian. Hours later, when members of the community finally rescued them, they realised a wooden spike had pierced the old woman's leg. No one was able to stop the bleeding and the leg became infected. Neither cell phones nor the internet worked, and most roads were closed due to landslides and fallen trees. The woman died of her untreated wound a couple of days later. In the month since Otis struck, residents of Cerrito de Oro, and across Coyuca de Benítez – in Ejido Viejo, San Isidro, Yetla, El Bodornal, and other towns – have been left wondering why help has failed to come, perpetuating a history of poverty and neglect. “Until Otis hit, many people didn’t know all these communities even existed. We only knew about Acapulco,” Mónica González, national communication coordinator for the Mexican Red Cross, told The New Humanitarian. Over the past month, the Mexican government’s help and reconstruction efforts have focused mainly on the coastal, touristic parts of Acapulco, residents and aid responders say. Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in other neighbourhoods of the city, and in the surrounding towns, has continued to deteriorate, as some communities face what has been described as the worst health crisis in the region's history. The amount of debris the hurricane left behind, the uncollected trash accumulating in the streets – attracting insects and rats – compounded by the lack of sanitation and access to clean water has been making residents increasingly sick with stomach infections, diarrhoea, skin rashes, and respiratory diseases. Children are the most seriously affected, while hospitals and health centres are difficult to reach or only functioning at limited capacity. The presence of stagnant water is also threatening to cause outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue or Zika.
Unfortunately this is too true for many crisis situations around the world