Firefighters finally home from Cabo: 'We figured it was time to try'
It was five days since Hurricane Odile struck the resort town of Los Cabos, Mexico, and Hoffman Estates fire Lt. Tom Mangiameli's wedding party had enough.
The groom, wife Kathy and their 46 wedding guests — including 16 current members of the fire department — were stranded at their ocean-side hotel with no electricity or flushing toilets and only intermittent cellphone service.
The management of the Hotel Riu Palace was telling guests it wasn't safe to leave, warning them they were in danger from the looters outside if they tried to get to the airport, 37 miles away.
“No matter how many ways we asked them, ‘What was the best way to get to the airport?' their answer was, ‘Stay here. It's safe here,'” said Bart Needham, who was among the first firefighters to get back home early Friday morning.
As conditions deteriorated, one hotel employee came forward. He could get six taxi vans ready at the crack of dawn Thursday, if the group had the courage to leave the hotel compound to meet them.
“The hotel people really didn't want people to do what we were doing, but at the same time, we figured it was time to try something,” Needham said.
The travelers slipped out of the hotel about 5 a.m., toting their luggage down a side road and through an industrial area heavily damaged by the hurricane. There, the vans they had been promised were waiting for them. They paid the drivers $30 a person and off they went to the airport.
Once at the airport, they started grabbing whatever flights were available. Needham flew to Phoenix, then caught a plane to Chicago. His plane touched down just after midnight Friday, and he went home, took a shower, got a couple hours of sleep and was at the firehouse for his 24-hour shift at 8 a.m.
It was just like any other day — some training in the morning and a couple of routine calls during the day.
“Being a firefighter, every third night we don't sleep a whole lot anyway, so I'm used to it,” said Needham, 45, an eight-year veteran. “Plus, I've been on vacation for a week.”
Two other firefighters were on Needham's flight back home. Later Friday, more flights of Hoffman Estates firefighters and wedding guests turned up at O'Hare, coming in from Phoenix or Los Angeles.
It seemed a long way away from a week ago, when they arrived in Los Cabos for Mangiameli's long-planned wedding in beautiful, exotic Mexico.
“Up to the day of the wedding, it was wonderful. The wedding was wonderful. The day after, however, not so good,” said Kathy Mangiameli, who stepped off the plane with her new husband late Friday afternoon. “We went to Paradise and we left a war zone.”
Tom Mangiameli said there wasn't a cloud in the sky during the wedding Saturday, and everyone had a great time — until the hurricane struck the next day.
“(The party) was rocking and rolling. Sunday came around. They thought (Odile) was going to go off shore,” he said.
Then Odile came ashore.
“The wind was unreal,” Needham said. “The pressure. The pounding doors. Windows rattling ... one of our guys was in a room with windows on three sides. He and his wife bailed into a bathroom, shoved a mattress up against the door and spent the night (there).”
The electricity went out. It came back Monday night, but it went out again Tuesday morning. Water stopped coming out of faucets, and toilets couldn't be flushed.
The firefighters improvised. They started a “bucket brigade,” Needham said, by taking hotel garbage cans, filling them with water from hotel pools and hoisting them up to the third floor.
“The pools were full of sand and mud and debris from the hurricane, but it worked great for flushing toilets,” Needham said.
The resort hosted some 500 people — most of whom took everything in stride, Needham said. When one of the hotel buildings flooded, people slept on cots in the resort's discotech. Some of the firefighters doubled up to help others out.
The resort served two meals a day — usually sandwiches, eggs, beans and rice — but no one went hungry, Needham said.
Firefighters left the resort briefly to look around at the damage but didn't stray far from the hotel. Less than 2 miles away, shops in downtown Los Cabos were being looted. Needham said local residents were seen taking cases of bottled water from the hotel.
“I didn't fear for my life, but I felt uncomfortable in the situation we were in,” Kathy Mangiameli said.
Hoffman Estates Fire Chief Jeff Jorian said firefighters are known for being resourceful and able to deal with stressful situations.
“They all remained calm, had good spirits about them and worked together as a team,” Jorian said. “Each one brought something to the table in order to be able to handle their situation down there. And they were also very willing to help other patrons in the hotel with them.
“It's just the kind of people that we have on our fire department and fire department members in general.”
Daily Herald staff photographer Mark Welsh contributed to this report.