Family survives fire only to be asphixiated by father’s fart

The good news is that we’re still standing. The bad news is that someone lost their roof. The good news is they had insurance and had just packed up (and away from their home) all their personal property. The bad news is that the original problem (un-insulated wires too close to palapa roofs) still exists. The good news is that the wires will be insulated in 2 weeks. The good news is that we were able to forget the fire by afternoon and take my sister and BIL for a snorkel in PaaMul’s bay and they didn’t even drown. The bad news is that by the time my sister headed out it was much rougher than C’s snorkel and she saw little of fish and much of sediment. The good news is that we got the generator running and were able to do about 37,499 loads of wash today. The bad news is that we only put a dent in the laundry.

I was awakened around 2 am by our neighbor, Natalie, physically rousing me from a deep sleep and wondering what the hell she was doing; didn’t she know I was sleepy? She finally got me out of bed and had to physically take me by the hand (I was concerned about going outside with only a t-shirt on, nothing else, literally NOTHING else) and drag me down to a choking smoke filled palapa for my brain to finally figure out the “Fire” she had been repeating to me over and over. I ran back to the palapa, fully awake now, and started getting ready to evacuate. We have six palapas between ours and the one which was to burn. PaaMul has a horrific history with fire; one took out the diveshop, restaurant and eight palapas and the other five palapas. In the last fire, the first palapa was gone in 4 minutes. So I had very little hope for our palapa and fully expected to return to charred embers.

The men of PaaMul, however, had other ideas. My BIL began working the fire by directing extinguishers and telling people to keep water away. Jamie ran up and down the lanes gathering extinguishers and bringing them to the incredibly brave souls fighting the fire. Residents here, those near the fire and far, suffered electrical shocks and choking smoke to keep the fire under control until the bomberos arrived. I fully believe that more palapas would have fallen had these heros not suffered for our gain. Electricity glowed around the entire affected palapa. The air sparked with electricity. Anything the firefighters touched immediately gave an electric shock. And yet they stayed and fought and endured shock after shock, burn after electric burn, screaming with pain and surprise in order that our palapas would be spared.

This morning many of the ladies of PaaMul took over Bart’s palapa and cleaned it from head to toe. His suffered smoke damage, soot, burning embers and a small patch of roofing burnt. I felt incredibly unhelpful but tried to do my part by taking care of and feeding all the kids of those working in Bart’s palapa. At one point we had 6 boys and 4 girls here.

After we processed our shock and unloaded the car we decided to take advantage of the light winds to escort Chris and my BIL around our bay. My BIL saw much more fish as he was able to snorkel to the reef but poor Chrissy hit the water after him, and as such, saw much more sediment due to more turbulent waters. We are hoping to take them to YalKu tomorrow so they can see many many fish and Chrissy had a lovely birthday dinner tonight at El Fogon. Just ignore the translation of that restaurant name for now.

One oddity (or not…); when unpacking the car this morning, I was somewhat shocked to find that the kids had packed the entire fruit bowl (oranges and avocados, thank you), an un-opened kilo bag of sugar (Jesse?) and a bag of granola. I, on the other hand, left my camera in our evacuated palapa so I resort to my birthday sister’s frightening pictures of the wee hours this morning.