Illustration By De Luna / Staff
Hurricane Hilary caused a massive mess in the California deserts and mountains in late August.
It also wreaked havoc for Southwestern College transfronterizos.
College leadership blundered badly when it decided to keep its campuses open on the first day of school this semester in the middle of a fierce tropical storm that a day earlier was a category 4 hurricane. August 21 was a once-a-century storm and its damage reached far and wide. Tijuana, Rosarito and other Baja California cities populated with Southwestern College students took a beating.
So did the students.
Heavy rain that flows smoothly down San Diego streets into well-maintained drainage systems can cause deadly flooding, mudslides, road collapses and chaos in Mexico’s unpaved hillside colonias and poorly maintained roadways. Flooding and chaos on August 21 was an epic nightmare south of the border.
And then, on top of all that, we were summoned to school, even though almost every other K-12 district in the county closed for one day. (South County’s elementary districts, Sweetwater and Southwestern engaged in hurricane force finger pointing, but that’s a story for another day.)
Southwestern needed to lead, but punted and endangered its students, particularly its vulnerable transfronterizos. We were forced to drive through flooded areas, ford streams, dodge fallen trees and diablito power lines wiggling near puddles, and trudge predawn miles in downpours. La linea was, of course, a ghoulish marathon of unstaffed lines, surly agents and flickering power.
Believe it or not it could have been much worse. The San Diego-Tijuana region caught a huge break when category 4 Hurricane Hilary wobbled eastward about 120 miles south of Ensenada and crossed over the Baja Peninsula, causing it to lose strength. It jigged north again and slid east of our mountains, averting the head-on collision with San Diego County sensible people were bracing for.
Our amateur meteorologists in the administrative suites had no way to know this would happen, which makes the decision to stay open even more reckless and arrogant. We shudder to think what could have happened with a direct hit.
President Dr. Mark Sanchez and Governing Board President Roberto Alcantar like to boast that they are homeboys who understand the borderlands culture and the transfronterizo community. Maybe they do, but they seem to have forgotten that 30-40 percent of Southwestern’s students live in Mexico and cross la frontera to attend college. (By the way, almost 40 percent of this newspaper staff lives in Tijuana, Puerto Nuevo and Rosarito.) This was a tone deaf decision and very disappointing for those of us who cross the border daily. Los jefes failed us that stormy day.
Southwestern College would have suffered no harm to its academics or its funding by delaying the start of school one day. We could have tacked on a day to the end of semester or found another creative way to catch up. Putting students’ lives at risk was entirely unnecessary.
We were lucky we did not have a repeat of Raj Chopra’s disastrous decision to keep the college open during the 2007 wildfires. A student died that day. Thank God no one died this time, but it was dumb luck.
Really dumb.
