On Saturday, November 7, 1998, I flew into Soto Cano, the U.S. expeditionary base in central Honduras.  The only sleep I had had in the previous two days was on the floor of the C-17 that brought me from Puerto Rico and it was a short flight.  I am a Lieutenant Commander and arrived with the first American military engineering unit, the Seabees, in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. 

Early the next morning, an Army colonel drove me to the main north-south highway in the country.  A section of road that spanned a 200-foot gorge had disappeared.  The ravine had been hastily filled with dirt.  18-wheelers hauling bananas to the port where trying to cross and it was like watching trucks trying to drive on a big bed of jello.  The tractor-trailers would start bouncing up and down like a sine wave studied in geometry.  About 2/3 of the way across the gorge, the truck would sink because the dirt had not been compacted.  An enterprising businessman with a bulldozer would tow them the rest of the way for a small fee. 

I didn’t hesitate when I told the colonel the problem required an engineering firm, a lot of money, a fair amount of time for the creation of plans and drawings, and was well beyond the capabilities of the Seabees. 

On October 22, 1998, a tropical depression formed in the Atlantic.  Four days later it was a colossal Category 5 storm.  Hurricane Mitch maintained Category 5 status for a continuous 33 hours and for 15 hours had sustained winds of 180 mph. 

When the storm hit Central America, it was so overwhelming that it was almost a week before news reports got out as to the extent of the destruction.  Water, not wind, wreaked the most havoc.  I was deployed to Honduras for three months, mostly on the northern coast in San Pedro Sula. Here are some of my perceptions of that havoc. 

Corporations weighted in heavily during the recovery effort.  Produce companies, especially Dole and Chiquita, played a critical role in deciding the reconstruction priority of bridges.  (Basically, whatever low-water crossings were required to open roads leading to the northern port cities became the main priority of the government also.)  I personally flew with senior managers in company owned helicopters to assess isolated areas. 

Local leadership really matters.  In the early phases of the response, the Mayor of Tegucigalpa (the capitol of the country) died in a helicopter crash while assessing the damage.  The Mayor was a clearly recognized authority figure who appeared to be coordinating the response.  The power vacuum created by his passing was never completely filled.  Try imagining NYC without Mayor Giuliani after September 11. 

The vast majority of the roads were impassable.  The loss of a bridge was the most common reason for a road to be closed.   If a safe road network to distribute relief items doesn’t exist, the quantity of relief materials being donated becomes inconsequential. 

Heavy-duty tractors.  There were plenty of trailers that could haul goods, but very few tractors that could pull the heavy loads over the hilly terrain.  About half of the Seabee tractors could not make it over the mountains.  Lack of adequate tractor-trailers and downed bridges were the chokepoints of all recovery efforts.  The US military had to contract with local companies for heavy-duty tractors to fulfill their mission.  These were also the same tractors that Dole and Chiquita were trying to use to get their bananas to the port city of San Pedro Sula for export.  The moral of the story is that the owners of operable heavy equipment after a disaster make a lot of money. 

Sewage disposal is always a huge dilemma in any humanitarian crisis, but it is greatly exasperated when water supplies become contaminated, which in turn contaminates the mud that covers everything. 

A very bizarre food chain emerged.  Animals were eating dead bodies and then villagers were killing the animals for food. 

Managing expectations is very hard.  From a purely engineering viewpoint, for Central America to fully recover from this horrific storm will require enormous amounts of funding, a sizable amount of time for proper planning and engineering calculations (especially for the large spans of bridges lost), and patience.  NGO’s do an amazing job helping victims immediately following a tragedy, but Hurricane Mitch’s harsh legacy will be measured in decades not weeks.