Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Mexico – In the grim darkness, as 160-mph winds lashed this small city, she lay in pain.
The electricity had long since gone out. Doors were stitched tight. The streets were bare.
But Angelica Tun Puc was awake in a powerless hospital in the Yucatán Peninsula, fighting through the labor pains that began the night before.
Sometime before 9 a.m. Tuesday, while rain pelted windows secured only by crosses made of tape, Tun Puc gave birth to a wriggling baby girl.
Tun Puc showed off her hurricane-day newborn for a small group of reporters and the officers who rushed her to the hospital after finding her close to giving birth in a remote village.
The birth was a small blessing on a day of huge blessings. Hurricane Dean, the storm that the Mexican news media dubbed “El Gigante” – the giant – somehow found the one route through the Yucatán Peninsula that would cause the least damage, well south of Cancún’s glitzy hotels and thick residential neighborhoods.
Trees fell, glass cracked, but there was none of the widespread wreckage that a storm this huge – the first Category 5 hurricane in 25 years to make landfall in the Atlantic basin – was capable of sowing.
Dean killed 12 people during three days in the Caribbean, but no deaths had been recorded in Mexico by late Tuesday.
Dean is forecast to regain strength as it passes over the Gulf of Campeche and back onto Mexico today.
The storm is expected to deliver winds in excess of 100 mph between two of the country’s most important port cities: Tampico and Veracruz.
Jorge Ortiz, a retired airline worker, was not worried. “Here in Veracruz, we’re blessed by God,” he said. “They always say the storms are going to get us, but we are always safe.”
