by Dwight Wayne Coop, with thanks to Smith/Riegel, photographers

Space precludes mention of all those who performed valiantly in the Atitlán Basin during the Stan crisis. Here are a few of the many stories..

Panajachel morphed into a bizarre Titanic on terra firma the day Hurricane Stan collided with the town’s annual fair. During the three-day storm beginning on October 3, the candy stands, video arcades and ring-toss booths huddled for dryness under a blustery stratum of plastic sheeting. The Ferris wheels and carrousels sat clam-shut under Stan’s wet wrath; none would ever raise up a rusty arm in celebration. But the disaster itself raised up something better: heroes. Stan showed Panajachel and its neighbors who their champions are.

Newlyweds Victoria and Louis De Peña, MD, finished moving into their new house in Santa Catarina the very day Stan struck.

“It poured all day,” Victoria says. “It was surreal. People were standing around, dazed. Mudslides had buried much of town. The main street was up to the second story in mud.”

The road to Panajachel was also inundated. With medic Chris Halter, the couple converted the parish church into a hospital to replace the town’s washed-away clinic. The trio would treat 140 sick and traumatized people during the crisis.

“We made nonstop cell phone calls for help,” Victoria says. “Mercy missions on boats started coming by October 7.”

Gasoline was scarce, since Panajachel’s gas stations were out. But Irish Kelly Agnew and her husband, Vermonter Dave Mason, managed to get a boat of food staples to Santa Catarina. Bi-national artisan ‘Indian Sarah’ Matzar sponsored another, as did Spanish pediatrician Mercedes Alonzo and husband, Andrais.

Hotels backed individual efforts. Porta del Lago hosted a relief campaign captained by Frenchman Francois Collinot, Guatemalan ‘Chio’ Secaira, M.D., New Yorker ‘Googie’ Sandoval and Italian Bennedetta Lettera. Guatemala’s government choppered in supplies and an agriculture ministry official. Hotel Porta also dispensed free drinking water to anyone with a container.

Across the lake, the mud-and-boulder slides that obliterated Panabaj missed the Posada de Santiago by a few providential meters. Without hesitation, the Posada opened its doors to feed and shelter evacuees.

The Villa Santa Catarina became a relief distribution center and gave free rooms to volunteers. Also in Santa Catarina, Casa Palopó, hired a helicopter to bring medicine and food.

By October 5, Panajachel made CNN even as Hurricane Rita threatened Texas. Panajachel’s expatriates were on the minds of their loved ones elsewhere, especially those who had confused Panajachel with Panabaj. But getting through was dicey; as the disaster progressed, the telecommunications grid buckled along with Panajachel’s bridges. In all, some 100 families living in or near the river channel bisecting town would lose their homes.

When the river jumped its banks, waiter Raúl Chingo left his tables to help any way he could. He forded out and convinced a woman who refused to leave that her life was worth more than protecting her furniture. He dragged her through the currents, fearing for his own life. “But the people watching from the levee threw me a lasso in time.”

That levee was breached within hours, threatening Chingo’s own house, which, though muddied, survived. When CONRED (Guatemala’s disaster-abatement agency), ordered him and his family to evacuate, they grabbed some blankets and headed for the Assembly of God church where, like others, they slept on pews. Many congregants took evacuees into their homes.

The Monroe-Smith family, Floridian operators of a Panajachel cinema-café, helped the church to feed the evacuees and screened the likes of Veggie Tales when boredom-relief became a priority. Melanie Monroe was also seen at the municipal gymnasium passing out toothbrushes, toothpaste and diapers to homeless families. She and a friend bought toothbrushes until they ran out of cash. The banks were closed, so they borrowed cash and bought until stores ran out of toothbrushes. Eventually they passed out single brushes to entire families, rather than to individuals. The last brush went to a family of 14, who was happy to get it.

Some 70 families plus uncounted individuals found refuge in the gymnasium, where the city set up a soup kitchen under basketball hoops. Some evacuees enjoyed relative privacy by bunking under the concrete bleachers; the rest camped on the floor.

The gymnasium not only drew evacuees but volunteers—Guatemalans, expatriates, tourists. Canadian Sharon Pogue assigned them chores as they showed up. American Patti Mort ferried people and supplies nonstop. Karen Evert, recruited help to fill and lay sandbags to divert the river, an effort which may have saved the Ubico Bridge from the fate of Panajachel’s four other bridges, which were destroyed.

Before an entire neighborhood above the Ubico Bridge disappeared, Australian Annette de García waded out to her home at dusk to salvage her children’s belongings. While she was there, the river swelled, crashing about her disintegrating house with “car-sized boulders.” She waited until 2 a.m. for an apparent lull, then attempted to get out. Nothing doing; the current was too strong. She caught a post here, a treetop there, and prayed for landfall, eventually snagging a water tower. By dawn, Guatemalans spotted her on the now precariously tottering tower. One recognized her. “It was Annette,” says Juan Ralón, who had lost his own house. Ralón, ‘Tito’ Cattouse and René Portillo improvised a rope into a harness and entered the torrent.

“By the time they got to me,” de García recalls, “I was horizontal, fluttering in the current, holding on to that tower. What they did was pure heroism or pure madness. I owe them my life.”

“The wonderful thing,” she adds, “is the way all Panajachel, Guatemalan and otherwise, came together and labored side-by-side.”

One valiant rescuer, Byron Fernández, entered the rapids again and again. He pulled children away from families who refused to leave, then went back for the mothers and grandparents. He and others also helped rescue a fireman knocked unconscious by a boulder. Inevitably the current swept him up; he survived, but needed countless stitches. These are his battle scars, if his grandchildren ever ask what he did when Stan’s watery whip scourged their city. Such storms may be 50-year events in Guatemala, but Panajachel will remember its heroes until disaster strikes again.