ENSENADA, Mexico — Hurricane Simon was supposed to be yesterday’s story. By Tuesday it had become today’s tragedy: six people are dead along Mexico’s Pacific coast, five are still missing, and a coastal city in Baja California that barely registered on most hurricane maps is now the center of a rescue operation.
The worst of it hit where nobody was watching
Simon itself spent the weekend dragging heavy rain over Guerrero state in southern Mexico, killing one person. But the storm that did the most damage was already dead — the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel, which flooded the coastal city of Ensenada in Baja California with terrifying speed.
Five of the six dead were found in and around Ensenada. The victims, identified by the Baja California state prosecutor’s office, include a 13-year-old girl whose body was found Sunday, two women aged 30 and 35, a 4-year-old boy — all recovered Monday — and an unidentified person found near a stream on Tuesday.
Five more people are still missing: three in Ensenada, and a father and son who took a boat out fishing near San Felipe, on the Gulf of California, on Saturday and never came back. About 300 soldiers, police officers and rescue workers searched along Ensenada’s El Pipila stream on Tuesday while the Mexican Navy hunted for the fishermen.
A night that sounded like the ocean
Johana Nuriulu, who lives in Ensenada’s Buena Vista community, said the flooding arrived overnight, shortly after heavy rain knocked out the electricity. She told reporters she heard a roar like ocean waves — “but very intense.” When she stepped outside, a stream had overflowed its banks.
“The water was sweeping everything away; it took a cabin… animals, everything.”
Floodwaters swept cars off roads, damaged homes and cut off whole communities, according to state civil protection authorities.
Simon is not done
Meanwhile the hurricane that started all of this is, if anything, getting stronger. Simon was still crawling off Mexico’s Pacific coast as a Category 1 storm on Tuesday, soaking the states of Nayarit and Sinaloa — where authorities remained on alert for rising rivers — and the U.S. National Hurricane Center reported it was nearly a major hurricane again Tuesday night.
That makes this a two-front emergency: one storm strengthening offshore while the other storm’s leftovers are still being dug out of the mud.
Why this matters
Deadly floods in Ensenada are not the headline Mexico’s hurricane season was supposed to produce. The season’s big damage was expected in Sinaloa and Guerrero, where Simon first made landfall. Instead, the worst toll came hundreds of kilometers north, from the decaying remnants of a weaker storm — the kind of outcome that makes forecasting dangerous weather so hard: the named hurricane makes the warnings, but the remnant that nobody is watching does the killing.
This was already a developing story — our earlier coverage of Hurricane Simon tracked the storm as it crawled off Sinaloa’s coast. Mexico’s civil protection system will be under pressure now not just to finish the search in Ensenada but to prepare Nayarit and Sinaloa for what Simon does next. The storm is moving slowly, and slow storms are the ones that dump the most water. It joins a brutal season that has already seen Florida burying its own dead after Hurricane Isaias — a reminder that the Pacific and Atlantic are both producing storms that refuse to follow the forecast.
