ACAPULCO, Mexico — In the first minutes of Oct. 25, as Hurricane Otis barreled into Acapulco Bay with winds of 165 miles per hour, sailor Ruben Torres recorded a 10-second audio message from a yacht named Sereno.
“All in all I’m fine, but it’s really terrible, it’s really terrible, it’s really terrible,” he said over the howling wind and the boat’s beeping alarms. “Family, I don’t want to exaggerate, but pray for us because it’s really terrible out here.”
The Sereno was one of 614 boats – yachts, ferries, fishing boats – that were in the bay that night and ended up damaged or on the seabed, according to the Mexican Navy. Of those aboard the Sereno, one person survived, while Torres and the boat’s captain remain missing.
Otis officially killed at least 48 people, most drowning, and about 26 are missing. Sailors, fishermen and their families believe there is much more.
Sailors in the area typically board their boats during a storm rather than staying on land where they would be safe so they can move the boats to sheltered parts of Acapulco Bay rather than abandoning them where a storm could hurl them into docks , and they do harm too.
But Otis was no ordinary storm. When the sailors went to sea that day, no one expected that the tropical storm would strengthen into a Category 5 hurricane within 12 hours and make a direct hit on Acapulco, leaving no part of the bay safe.
Susana Ramos, Ruben Torres’ wife, heard her husband’s message just days later.
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Torres’ family knew his routine when a hurricane approached: He boarded to help care for the boat, and the crew steered it near the naval base in an area surrounded by mountains that surround the bay. is better protected. Ramos prepared dry clothes for his return.
On Oct. 24 around 7 p.m., Torres spoke with his eldest son, now 14. Ramos was heard describing what it looked like back then, when entire hills in Acapulco went dark when the power went out. But Torres said he had his life jacket ready and the engines running in case.
Hours later, the family home began to flood. Buckets full of water came in. “The walls were like crying,” Ramos said. But the truly frightening thing was “the piercing hiss of the air,” like the squealing of a tire over their heads and the creaking of the house.
She remembered her husband always saying, “Don’t be afraid of the water, be afraid of the wind.”
As Torres recorded the final message asking his family to pray for him, a dozen members crowded into the concrete house.
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Otis’ damage on land was apparent at first light. The city woke up isolated, with no electricity, phone reception or water. Tens of thousands of houses were destroyed, entire city districts were flooded, and luxury hotels without walls or windows were hollowed out. There were trees, power poles and debris everywhere.
Details of the situation at sea are emerging more slowly.
Alejandro Martínez Sidney, a business leader and member of a fishing cooperative, has heard the accounts of surviving sailors. He said they were caught off guard by the sudden strength of the storm. The evening before Otis landed, an alarm was sounded around 10 p.m., telling sailors to beach their boats.
“It was too late,” Martínez Sidney said.
Many, like Torres, had already sailed to the presumably more sheltered parts of the bay. Others, not wanting to damage their boats by beaching them, followed his example, but ended up in a whirlpool in the middle of the bay, survivors told him.
It was like a “mega tornado” that engulfed them, said Martínez Sidney.
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Ramos was worried. The next day, she traversed 8 miles of devastated cityscape—on foot through mud, by motorcycle and hitchhiking on trucks—to get to the Sereno’s dock.
The sight of the boats running aground on Acapulco’s waterfront boulevard shocked her. Overlooking the bay, the boats looked like old, broken toys, she said.
She called out her husband’s name and pushed through other families looking for their loved ones. She was taken to six recovered bodies. None were from Sereno.
Then she started checking hospitals, and lists of dead and missing people began circulating. She went to the naval base, the mortuary. There, she had just enough battery in her phone to show them a photo of Torres.
She said when she heard an officer say they would call her if they confirmed anything, she realized she would have to be the one to look for him.
A few days later, when power and phone reception were sporadically restored in some areas, she finally received her husband’s message. This made her feel powerless.
“It is so heartbreaking for me to receive this final news,” she said.
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Sailors and fishermen immediately began searching for the boat that was still seaworthy. Sometimes they had to siphon gasoline from parked cars for their engines.
Some yacht owners, like the Sereno’s, rented boats and small planes to search them while also providing necessities to the families of crew members who had lost everything.
Ramos and her brother-in-law crisscrossed Acapulco on a motorcycle chasing rumors of survivors. A crew member of the Sereno was found alive on an island in the bay.
The sailor tearfully told Ramos how they all jumped into the water with their life jackets on, but he managed to hold on to a floating marine fender, a bumper-like device from the boat, which saved him.
Families have protested that authorities should take over the search because they have better equipment.
Enrique Andrade, a teacher who was searching for his younger sister Abigail, who was aboard a ship called the Litos, said he accompanied the Navy, divers and prosecutors’ agents on searches. Of the Litos, they only found “a small door,” he said.
Andrade said authorities did not do enough to warn crew members. “The Navy knew what was coming, the maritime terminals knew it too and they still didn’t pass on the information,” Andrade said.
The Navy has recovered 67 small boats, but more than 500 are longer than 40 feet, according to Alejandro Alexandres González, a captain who spoke to reporters during a search operation.
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Ramos’ life now consists of a daily visit to the morgue where DNA samples from her children were taken and of pausing her cellphone at a window in her home, where there is sometimes a signal when there is news of her husband’s whereabouts .
Sleeping in her mother’s embrace and thinking about her children gave her strength.
The small grocery store she had rented to help her husband pay off his debts and live in a less violent neighborhood was one of the thousands of stores that desperate residents had evacuated after Otis. She tries to convince herself that she can start over again.
Showing photos from their youngest daughter’s 10th birthday, which they had celebrated a week earlier, Ramos said the girl had been keeping an eye on the door, hoping her father would return.
Ramos hopes to hear news on November 17, when her husband turns 33.
“It would be really great if they at least told me he was there; It would be a miracle if they told me he was there in the hospital, come… and I would carry him back.”
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AP video journalist Fernanda Pesce contributed to this report.