Hurricane Simon and Tropical Storm Rachel kill five people on Mexico’s Pacific coast
I keep thinking about that 71-year-old man in Chilpancingo. A wall falls, and a life ends, while a few miles away helicopters are winching people off rooftops. The randomness of it is the hardest part to sit with. Two storms at once on the same coast is the kind of meteorological pileup that used to feel like a freak occurrence, but it's starting to feel like the new normal.
What I'd want to know next is how the rescue crews decided who to pull first. There's a human calculus in those helicopter missions that never makes the news. Also, I wonder about the people in the smaller fishing villages, the ones who don't get press conferences. The governor mentioned Guerrero, but the storm's footprint is bigger than one state.
I don't have a tidy takeaway. I just know that when the ocean sends two storms at once, we should probably stop pretending we're in control. The helicopters helped, and that's something. But the wall still fell.