Just Wondering?

JANET/NJ

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If anyone expirieced the following back in 1998.With all the current hurricanes....i remembered that back in 1999 a hurricane named Charlie passed by DR causing enormous damage to the island. Most of the deaths i believe could of been prevented but due to lack of weather advisory a lot of lives were lost.

3 to 4 days after the storm the country did not trust anything the news would say,because when the hurricane was coming they told everyone not to worry.

On or about the fourth day a rumor was spread that a Tsunami was going to hit the island. I remember visiting my aunt who lives withing walking distance from the Acuario in Santo Domingo............thats right next to the ocean :nervous:
I remember people gathering what little they could to head into higher ground, others went to hospitals and took their sick relatives out. At the time i was a bit scared (DR is such an insecure country) but when i think of the things i saw that morning at about 4am all i can do is laugh.

We had to slap my cousin because she became hysterical........peoples houses were broken into and the tigeres made a pretty buck with the things they stole.

Did anyone else expirience this in 1998?
 

KateP

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May 28, 2004
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JANET/NJ said:
If anyone expirieced the following back in 1998.With all the current hurricanes....i remembered that back in 1999 a hurricane named Charlie passed by DR causing enormous damage to the island. Most of the deaths i believe could of been prevented but due to lack of weather advisory a lot of lives were lost.

3 to 4 days after the storm the country did not trust anything the news would say,because when the hurricane was coming they told everyone not to worry.

On or about the fourth day a rumor was spread that a Tsunami was going to hit the island. I remember visiting my aunt who lives withing walking distance from the Acuario in Santo Domingo............thats right next to the ocean :nervous:
I remember people gathering what little they could to head into higher ground, others went to hospitals and took their sick relatives out. At the time i was a bit scared (DR is such an insecure country) but when i think of the things i saw that morning at about 4am all i can do is laugh.

We had to slap my cousin because she became hysterical........peoples houses were broken into and the tigeres made a pretty buck with the things they stole.

Did anyone else expirience this in 1998?

I was living in Ens. Isabelita at the time, also close to the Acuario. But as I recall, it was Georges that came for a visit... As for the "maremoto", my neighbour came banging on my bedroom window at 4am yelling that we'd all get drowned and to get out of the house. Since there was so much noise in the street, my mother and I ended up sitting on the porch watching people running back and forth and loading everything on their roofs. If I recall correctly, ended up being a guy in San Pedro that started that rumor. Man, word does fly in the DR when it wants to!! lol
 

BushBaby

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KateP said:
I was living in Ens. Isabelita at the time, also close to the Acuario. But as I recall, it was Georges that came for a visit...

Yes it WAS "Georges" that (as you so nicely put it) "Came for a visit"!! Everyone including DR1 was adamant that the whole force of "Georges" was going to take a northward turn & come right up the north coast, but "George" had other ideas 7 continued directly westward taking Santo Domingo by quite some force! The loss of life was VERY high as I remember & mainly due to flooding & mud slides PLUS the serious case of a damn breaking & the waters therefrom engulfing hundreds of people, some of whom had relocated there as their "Safe Shelter" areas!! Track changed shortly after Santo Domingo & went up the Cibao valley destroying fruit crops all the way!!

I remember being at the computer most of that time passing out information (where I had it) to the hundreds of enquiries that were coming in to DR1 - the only reliable source of information back then!!! The power went off quite soon after "Georges" struck, but with an inverter I was able to keep typing out information for another 13 hours!!

Hurricanes are fearsome things & if any of you Brits that got evacuated from Jamaica to Puerto Plata ever get to read this,..... stop winging because your tour operator did EXACTLY the right thing & possibly saved a few of your lives at the same time!!! - Grahame.
 

Mirador

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Apr 15, 2004
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The 'tsunami' scare was something else. The parque Mirador Sur park was packed full of people before dawn...relatives knocked on my door since I live on 'high ground' (Bella Vista). It's hard to believe someone in San Pedro de Macor?s could have started this ball rolling... By the way, twice in historical times the town of my ancestors (Azua) has been wiped out by tsunamis and earthquakes. Many other towns have suffered similar fates.
 

Robert

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Yep, fun times back in 1998. Chaos was all around!

I was with my sister and family traveling on the North Coast and everybody was preparing for a hit, so we decided on good advice to drive back to the safety of Santo Domingo and avoid Georges. We arrived at Dolores?s house at 1 or 2 am and was told that we should have stayed on the North Coast as the hurricane had turned and Santo Domingo was looking at a direct hit.

Dolores?s place lost most of the roof and sustained lots of flooding damage, but the DSL kept on working, so we kept on posting My sister and family had fun and appeared more concerned about running out of tea bags than the apartment around them being ripped apart. It was "tea time" every 30 mins and Dolores's poor husband couldn't sleep for days he had so much caffine in him.

I remember the emails from out hosting company back then asking what was going on with the server as it was going crazy with so much traffic.
CNN had decided to link to us, I had to email them to take it down as our server was exploding. Not only did we have a fun 24hrs with the hurricane, it costs us US$400+ in bandwidth :)
 

JANET/NJ

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Jun 21, 2004
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Wow!

KateP said:
I was living in Ens. Isabelita at the time, also close to the Acuario. But as I recall, it was Georges that came for a visit... As for the "maremoto", my neighbour came banging on my bedroom window at 4am yelling that we'd all get drowned and to get out of the house. Since there was so much noise in the street, my mother and I ended up sitting on the porch watching people running back and forth and loading everything on their roofs. If I recall correctly, ended up being a guy in San Pedro that started that rumor. Man, word does fly in the DR when it wants to!! lol


How funny right.......i was 3 months pregnant and my cousin scared the heck out of me, screaming to the top of her lungs "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE".
You might be right about the name, i could of sworn it was charlie.
I have a lot of aunts and cousins that live in Ens. Isabelita........you might of known my cousin Marilyn she works in the Papalino Pharmacy.
 

KateP

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May 28, 2004
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JANET/NJ said:
How funny right.......i was 3 months pregnant and my cousin scared the heck out of me, screaming to the top of her lungs "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE".
You might be right about the name, i could of sworn it was charlie.
I have a lot of aunts and cousins that live in Ens. Isabelita........you might of known my cousin Marilyn she works in the Papalino Pharmacy.

Couldn't say I know her... I moved out of there years ago and didn't know all that many people. Georges is the main reason why my mom moved back to Canada. She couldn't stand the feeling of total helplessness. I didn't help much either when I went up to the roof to retrieve the "tapa del tinaco" that had blown off. She was sure I was going to go flying... came close to it too. As for the maremoto, I just remember sitting on the front steps thinking, "these people are really nuts... couldn't they just shut up so I can get back to bed??! Que vaina!" Those are definately two moments that go down in my book as memorable!
 

Keith R

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Jan 1, 2002
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Ah, such memories....

I remember Georges all too well...in fact, if we could still access the DR1 archives from September 1998, you'd find my posts, before and after, describing the craziness before, the terror during, and the difficulties afterward. Like Grahame says, everyone claimed the storm was going to hit the North Coast, but we in SD got much of it instead. Lights out midday, no TV or radio to speak of except a few brave Christian radio stations, the wind howling... jesus, gives me the shivers just recalling. We still have the video we took from our front porch (alee of the carport, so semi-sheltered) of the hurricane winds bending and snapping trees, signs and zinc roofs flying past...I remember the winds howling that night in totally dark streets choked with downed trees and vegetation, a very eerie sight. And the days that followed in which our only water was from rain run-off...

I remember too the maremoto scare, albeit in a perhaps more funny manner. We slept with the windows open, since after the storm we went awhile with zero power, and then sporadic. Middle of the night we hear our neighbor's phone ring, then frantic scrambling, and then their car speed off. We thought maybe a relative was gravely ill or dying in a hospital or some such, so we went back to sleep. Only next morning did we find out about the maremoto rumor sweeping through the country, and how our neighbors joined thousands at the Mirador Sur park just a few blocks away (which makes no sense, since we were higher up than the park!)

Regards,
Keith
 
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JANET/NJ

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Jun 21, 2004
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1998

I was safe at home in La Venta, Manoguallabo during the huricane........but my family in Ens.Isabelita lost a lot of the furniture and most of their roofs.
The day after the storm we headed out to El Cibao to see how our family members in Cotui and neighboring towns were doing........once we left Cotui and headed to Pimentel we had to go all the way around and enter the city thru Macoris because of the flooding.

Santo Domingo looked so bad.....the trees all around looked like if someone had chopped them up with a machete.

During the storm the Tigeres raided the grocery store next to my house and all you can see were bottles of rum, coffe bags, rice, oil ect., just shooting out of one of the coners of the house...the "sin" had flown off the roof from the storm.
I remember also how they raided a chicken place where we bought our eggs, pleople just kept passing by my house with chickens in bags, sacos and any other way they could take them.

A roof from a neighboring house landed on top of the house next to it.

It was a terrible situation and the idiot that invented the lie about the tsunami did not make things any easier.
This should go under the thread..........."ONLY IN DR"
 

JANET/NJ

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Jun 21, 2004
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oh my god......

BushBaby said:
Yes it WAS "Georges" that (as you so nicely put it) "Came for a visit"!! Everyone including DR1 was adamant that the whole force of "Georges" was going to take a northward turn & come right up the north coast, but "George" had other ideas 7 continued directly westward taking Santo Domingo by quite some force! The loss of life was VERY high as I remember & mainly due to flooding & mud slides PLUS the serious case of a damn breaking & the waters therefrom engulfing hundreds of people, some of whom had relocated there as their "Safe Shelter" areas!! Track changed shortly after Santo Domingo & went up the Cibao valley destroying fruit crops all the way!!

I remember being at the computer most of that time passing out information (where I had it) to the hundreds of enquiries that were coming in to DR1 - the only reliable source of information back then!!! The power went off quite soon after "Georges" struck, but with an inverter I was able to keep typing out information for another 13 hours!!

Hurricanes are fearsome things & if any of you Brits that got evacuated from Jamaica to Puerto Plata ever get to read this,..... stop winging because your tour operator did EXACTLY the right thing & possibly saved a few of your lives at the same time!!! - Grahame.


Yes i remember the whole incident with the damn and how they found people upside down with their legs sticking up while the rest of their body was buried in the mud. Family members were never found for some and others found their relatives miles away from the town they lived. :cry:
 

Chirimoya

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I was in the UK but following things closely because of beloved friends and colleagues in the DR. The BBC news interviewed some Dominican government spokesman who sounded completely off his head. Speaking in English he responded to the reporter's concerned questions about the loss of life and damages to property with a demented speech about how Dominicans love hurricanes, how they all run out and celebrate. Totally barking. When I remember this, I wonder who the hell he was, and what he was on.
 

BushBaby

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It was probably Hippo Mejia practicing for his days in power!!! A sortof "Learn to lie about everything, be rediculous in responses & be totally incomprehensible to the rest of the world"!! He obviously learned his trade well looking at the way he spoke to news reporters & media during the last 4 years!! - Grahame.
 

Lambada

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I can remember only having sufficient Spanish to catch 30% of the news back in 1998 - dangerous because one is apt to get it wrong. However, as the day progressed, the met. forecaster who was presumably in Santo Domingo, became more & more excitable with each report, less & less coherent to the point of total inability by me to understand anything he said. Obviously that was the moment he realised Georges was heading for Higuey & Santo Domingo, not the north coast.........when he got to hysterical I asked my next door neighbour to come in with her daughter & translate. She had no power so was happy to share our TV. She watched...she listened....and then she crossed herself (the longest 5 seconds of my life!)....and then told us it was not headed for us.

I also remember all the children in San Juan de la Maguana, I believe, being put in the solid schoolroom for safety......and then the dam bursting & taking them all.