The Cyclone Nobody Saw: Risks that Potentiated a Disaster in the Northwest of Mexico

Abstract

The warming of the Gulf of California generated the first hydrometeorological phenomenon in a region where a tropical cyclone had never occurred. The Tropical Depression 19-E affected the states of Sinaloa, Sonora and Baja California Sur in September 2018. The water temperature increased two degrees generating a storm that developed rapidly and prevented the issuance of early warnings. To determine the social and material damages, an ethnographic research was carried out from the hours after the impact of the storm in the city of Culiacán, and it continued for several months. The results show how governmental and social actors work with unexpected or announced cyclones, where disaster and post-disaster accentuated people's vulnerability due to the sum of old risks with the new ones. This article begins with a general description of northwestern Mexico, in anticipation of the case study, including a tour that shows the development of the disaster in real time and the structural consequences of a meteorological phenomenon that threatens to recur due to global warming.

Keywords

• inundaciones, ciclón, vulnerabilidad social, calentamiento global, riesgos, méxico