Ever since Hurricane Odile made a direct hit on Cabo San Lucas last Sunday night, cutting off power to much of the area and variously destroying a number of hotels, upwards of 10,000 American tourists have been left on their own to try to escape the peninsula. The story began making headlines this past week, though families returning from the hurricane-ravaged resort area and local families who have remained cut off from loved ones who have yet to escape say that not enough attention has been given to the situation in the media and that the U.S. government should have been doing more to help.
As Bay Area resident Adam Bremer tells ABC 7, having just made it back home from Cabo early Friday via a military transport plane to Mexico City, "We're appalled to see that the iPhone 6 is making more news than this. This is a humanitarian disaster, probably pretty equal to Hurricane Katrina."
The Chronicle reports, "Managers and staff of several big hotels fled, and other resorts were left with no resources," leaving some 30,000 foreign tourists without a clue how to survive. Some reported riots in the streets that kept them barricaded in their flooded hotels. The parents of Lisa Vasquez have been unable to reach their daughter, down there on vacation with her fiancé, all week, and have been speaking publicly with the media.
Teresa Pedrozo of San Francisco tells the Chron she was down in Cabo with 13 friends for a bachelorette party, and they only luckily managed to board one of the first military flights out of the airport on Tuesday, finally making it back to SFO with the help of Alaska Airlines which sent an empty plane down for Americans stranded in Mazatlan.
With countless tourists still stranded and supplies already low, Tropical Storm Polo was expected to hit Cabo today.
