Anger grows and hope fades as Puerto Rico’s ground zero remains without power
bySuzanne GamboaandDaniella Silva
The Punta Santiago beachfront neighborhood in Humacao, Puerto Rico. Ricardo Arduengo / for NBC News
HUMACAO, Puerto Rico — The world-renowned resort
community here is a ghost town. No one sits by the three-tiered pool
even though it’s high tourist season. At the area’s largest hospital,
four of the five floors are closed. Long lines still form for ice and
water. Livelihoods have disappeared. “No hay luz” (there is no power) is a repeated refrain from almost everyone.
It has been three months since Hurricane Maria entered Puerto Rico like a battering ram through Humacao, sweeping through this southeastern coastal city and into the island’s history as its worst natural disaster.
But the catastrophe continues. Still largely without electricity and clean water, people who withstood the hurricane’s force feel abandoned and question whether the U.S. government cares about their survival.
Just about 45 minutes from the capital of San
Juan — longer with the heavy traffic now on the main highway — Humacao
used to draw tourists and Puerto Rican vacationers every year. Charter
yachts took passengers through the warm waters to the smaller Puerto
Rico island of Vieques. It is known for the world-class golf course at
the Palmas del Mar resort and its pharmaceutical and medical supplies industry.
Puerto Ricans keep the holiday spirit alive, even in the dark4:20
But as of mid-December, the U.S.-based
pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb — which manufactures
cardiovascular and anti-diabetes products and employs about 300 people —
was still running on generators. More than half of the city’s schools
were closed, along with an untold number of businesses, including
Humacao’s major shopping center, which housed Walmart, J.C. Penney,
Marshall’s and the local Capri department store, among others.
“We are still in Maria. Maria has not left
Humacao,” said Jahaira Paris, owner of a local drugstore, Farmacia
Central, in Humacao’s city center. Although her business is operating on
generators and seeing a spike in sales because the big shopping center
is closed, she waits for electricity at home and only recently got
running water.
This area has been the last to receive help, has
been the area that help has come to the slowest, even though it’s where
Maria got its start, said Puerto Rico Sen. José Dalmau Santiago. Right
after the hurricane, there were no images from Humacao of mudslides and
bridge collapses and refugee camps as in other communities, so “they
looked here too late,” he said.
A man walks past downed electricity poles in Punta Santiago. Ricardo Arduengo for NBC News
Dalmau, former president of the Senate Health
Committee, worries about the effect of this limbo on the city’s
pharmaceutical industry and the jobs it provides.
“It is a profound problem and I’m not sure if the government knows the magnitude of it,” Dalmau said.
The endless delay in providing power to the city
is the result of several factors, including bureaucratic stumbling over
the restoration to a long-outdated electrical grid run by a bankrupt
power company that is $9 billion in debt. The Army Corps of Engineers
considers Humacao “ground zero” for the force of the hurricane, which
left the power grid destroyed and in need of a complete rebuild,
according to Jay Field, public affairs officer for the Corps’ power
restoration task force. Photos: 100 days in the dark leave Puerto Ricans with glimmer of hope
Other cities that weren’t as affected are in
better shape than Humacao, where finding open gasoline stations is still
a guessing game each day and the phone signal is erratic.
With factories and businesses not fully up and
running because there is no electricity, workers’ income and business
and tax revenue are being lost. Buying staples like clothing requires
going to San Juan or other towns.
A car drives under downed power lines. Ricardo Arduengo for NBC News
“Humacao wasn’t like that,” Paris said. “Humacao had everything.”
For many residents, life has been reduced to
getting through each day, working to ensure there’s enough water, ice,
gasoline, oil and food. Without electricity, the pumping stations that
clean the water don’t work, and unrefrigerated food quickly spoils.
The stress of that daily scramble has sent hundreds of thousands fleeing the island, largely to Florida.
Puerto Ricans sticking it out wonder how long
they can last, particularly given the predictions that it could be
months, even a year, before Humacao is fully on the grid.
It’s a prospect Paris doesn’t want to endure.
“I’m desperate,” she said. If it takes that long, “I think I’d also get on a plane.”
‘It’s changed our lives radically’
The violent storm ripped the livelihoods from
Jose Torres and others who belong to the Asociación de Pescadores Unidos
(the United Fishermen’s Association) de Punta Santiago. The group of 16
plucked fish daily from the island’s waters and sold them to local
restaurants.
But Hurricane Maria destroyed some of their boats and the fish seem to have scattered.
People walk on a pier destroyed by Hurricane Maria. Ricardo Arduengo / NBC News
“This is octopus season and I see none. They
have left the area,” Torres said, pointing to two small bags of lobsters
caught that day. “Like all Puerto Ricans, it’s changed our lives
radically,” he said. “The suffering, the pain, the loss of how to make a
daily wage.”
Torres knows it will take time for the sea to
recover. With the rest of the city ailing, there are few jobs, so there
is desperation, Torres said.
“This is so slow and the damage is great,”
Torres said. “In eight months, we’ll be right back in hurricane season.
It would be so sad for that time to come and for us to go through
something like that again. This would practically turn into a deserted
island.”
‘Everyone is traumatized’
On Sept. 20, when Maria pounded its way into
Humacao, Torres awoke to the sound of screams from his daughter and
granddaughter. They were clinging to a fence gate behind their home in
rushing floodwaters. Torres managed to pull them inside to safety, but
nearly being sucked into Maria’s viciousness has left them shaken.
The memory of the disaster is impossible to
ignore, particularly in areas of Punta Santiago, a community in the
northeast corner of the Humacao municipality, where debris and destroyed
belongings still sit in streets and many people, including Torres, line
up to receive basic necessities at churches and a nonprofit. Related: Complete coverage of the Puerto Rico crisis
“Many don’t want to admit it, but you’ve lost
everything in less than 12 hours. You can still see it with your own
eyes, that you’ve lost everything,” Torres said. “Everyone is
traumatized.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has
distributed nearly 2,500 tarps in the Humacao municipality — the area
that encompasses the city of Humacao and nine “wards” or communities.
It’s also given out about $15 million in grants that don’t have to be
repaid and $1.1 million to the city, according to FEMA spokesman Daniel
Llargués.
Jose Luis Lluveras, 74, sits in front of his home that was destroyed during Hurricane Maria in Punta Santiago. Ricardo Arduengo / for NBC News
But those are stopgap fixes. Humacao can’t really get back on its feet until there is electricity.
Humacao’s residents, and essentially everyone
without power in Puerto Rico, are at the mercy of an electrical system
that was known to be frail, decrepit, mismanaged and broke long before Hurricane Maria hit.
The island got a preview of things to come when
Hurricane Irma sideswiped Puerto Rico on Sept. 6 and left 1 million
without power. Even before Irma, island power outages were frequent.
Weeks before Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto
Rico, Ricardo Ramos, the former head of the Puerto Rico Electrical
Authority, PREPA, doubted the electrical grid could withstand a major
storm and told Caribbean Business that the lifespan of most of PREPA’s equipment had expired.
If a large “atmospheric event” hit Puerto Rico,
it would “wreak havoc because we are talking about a very vulnerable and
fragile system at the moment,” Ramos said. He predicted power would be
out for weeks, underestimating the coming catastrophe.
Hurricane Maria has revealed that PREPA does not
have the poles, wires and other equipment to repair its electrical
grid. Brigades of electrical crews can be seen in Puerto Rico, but their
work can’t progress until they have the parts to put everything back
together.
For example, as of Dec. 15, the island needed
52,480 poles. It had 6,228 as of that date with another 8,500 to arrive
over two weeks, Caribbean Business reported. Also, 17 million
conductors, which carry the electrical charge, are needed, but just
347,000 were on the island. Workers had 7,639 insulators of 184,750
needed, the news outlet reported.
“You can have all the brigades in the world, but
if you don’t have the equipment and material, nothing gets done,” said
Philipe Schoene Roura, executive editor of Caribbean Business.
Hurricane Maria has revealed that PREPA does not have the poles, wires and other equipment to repair its electrical grid. Ricardo Arduengo for NBC News
There has been some movement in getting some
power to the island. The Puerto Rico government jettisoned a highly
controversial $300 million contract with Whitefish Energy, a company
considered inadequate for the job. The island’s governor, Ricardo
Rosselló, has requested help from utilities in the U.S., which has
brought in workers and crews. Mega-generators are powering some parts of
the island.
Michael Hyland, vice president of the American
Public Power Association, an industry group, said PREPA divided the
country into seven regions. Teams under supervision of a “storm boss”
hired by the utility industry are taking stock of what is needed by
region and ordering supplies from the mainland.
“I think you are going to see a steady increase (of supplies) in the next three weeks,” Hyland said.
Getting enough equipment is itself a dilemma.
With Texas and Florida also recovering from hurricanes, and California
still suffering from wildfires, there is a shortage of the poles, cable
transformers, fuses, towers and insulators that are needed, Field said
in an email.
Meanwhile, the Army Corps is installing “microgrids,”
which can operate without a connection to the main grid, in communities
in the Humacao municipality. The microgrids are meant to provide power
in areas where the grid is not expected to be energized in the near
future, Field said.
A man rides past a pile of damaged concrete posts in Punta Santiago. Ricardo Arduengo / for NBC News
Puerto Rico’s flimsy electrical system is “the
result of decades, decades, decades of mismanagement, of treating PREPA
as a cash cow by whomever was ruling the roost at the time, making
decisions that were practically criminal,” said Mike Soto-Class,
co-founder and president of the Center for a New Economy, a San
Juan-based non-partisan think tank.
“Now we are caught face-to-face with the reality of what that meant,” he said.
For Maria Martinez, 68, who lives in Punta
Santiago, it has meant sleeping every night at her son’s house, where
she feels more secure even though there is no electricity and the water
comes from a well that her son dug. She returns daily to her home, where
she waits for FEMA officials to assess her losses.
“The rain came in. I lost my bed, another bed,
everything in the living room,” Martinez said, crying as she recalled
seeing her home for the first time after the hurricane. “Now at night,
with no lights, it is not secure for me. I feel sad. The depression is
still hard.”
A hospital’s destruction
The hurricane came in with tornadoes and “whirlwinds” when it entered at Humacao and made landfall at nearby Yabucoa.
Its fierce torrent turned Hospital
Ryder-Humacao’s metal roof into a colander. There were 79 patients at
the 173-bed hospital at the time, a lot during a hurricane, said José
Feliciano Sepulveda, the hospital’s executive director.
Then came several more days of rain. “We had to
move patients from one floor to another as one floor would get filled
with water and we couldn’t control it,” Feliciano said.
FROM DEC. 23: Christmas in Puerto Rico less merry after Hurricane Maria1:53
Then the only power source, an emergency
generator, failed, forcing the hospital to evacuate patients, including
six in intensive care. Five
went by helicopter to the USNS Comfort, the Naval hospital ship that
had arrived at San Juan that day. Until the start of December, the
hospital was forced to operate on generator power and had to turn away
non-emergency patients, including women who had gone into labor, but had
time to get to another hospital.
Electricity returned to the hospital at the
start of December, but was unstable in its first week, creating
teeth-clenching days of hope that it stayed on in critical times.
Beyond the millions of dollars in damage, “many
doctors have left because they don’t have work now, especially
surgeons,” Feliciano said. Hospital officials hope to open a couple more
floors by the end of the year, get working again and maybe lure back
some doctors.
But many people need more help than doctors can provide, Feliciano said.
“I think the elderly are suffering a lot from
this and maybe they’ll last some time, but if things don’t get solved
immediately the depression can kill them,” he said.
Damaged houses on top of a hill in Yabucoa on Oct. 2. Ricardo Arduengo / AFP - Getty Images file
‘People have died because we didn’t have power’
The lack of power, especially at the hospital,
“es lo que me quita el sueño” – it’s what keeps me up at night, said
Dalmau, before ticking off the deaths he attributes to hospitals being
off the grid.
A woman in Caguas in frail health had a routine
knee operation as Hurricane Maria was closing in, but died in recovery
when the generators failed, he said.
The oxygen machine of the mother of a friend of
Dalmau’s failed when the electricity went out at the nursing home where
she was staying and she died. A 70-year-old friend of his father, who
had emphysema, decided not to go to the hospital when he had breathing
problems because the hospital lacked power. That decision proved fatal,
Dalmau said.
The official death toll from Hurricane Maria is 64, far more than the 16 cited by President Donald Trump, who said Puerto Rico should be proud the number was so low. But the toll of 64 deaths is itself believed to be far too low. A recent estimate by The New York Times suggested the real number may be more than 1,000.
A
man bikes past refrigerated FEMA trailers, which serve as a morgue
overflow outside the Institute of Forensic Sciences in San Juan, Puerto
Rico. Mario Tama / Getty Images
On Dec. 18, Rosselló acknowledged for the first
time that hurricane deaths may be higher than the official toll. He has
ordered a review of all deaths since Maria.
As long as there is no power, the Puerto Rican death toll could continue to rise.
José Oquendo Cruz, executive director of the area’s largest non-profit helping the disadvantaged, P.E.C.E.S.,
said a cousin rode his bike to his nephew’s home to break the boredom
of being in his home without power. Riding in the dark in Punta Santiago
with no electricity to power streetlights, the cousin was hit and
killed by a car whose driver fled.
“So the question is, is this a consequence of
Maria?” Oquendo asked. “I would answer, obviously yes, because there’s
no power and without power, crime goes up and there’s no civic
responsibility. The number of deaths that the government is reporting is
not (correct). There are many more.”
A grasp at normalcy amid economic uncertainty
Along Humacao’s roadways, there are signs that
some city residents are finding a bit of firmer footing: Diners sit at
stools on the patios of reopened chinchorros,
the local roadside eateries where visitors and residents stop for beer,
Puerto Rican frituras (fritters), music and camaraderie.
A man rests in a hammock beside a damaged kiosk along the Punta Santiago beachfront. Ricardo Arduengo for NBC News
A few employees from the Bristol-Myers Squibb
pharmaceutical plant were out at a local Chili’s for lunch recently.
There are shorter lines at bank ATM machines in a smaller shopping
center and now and again some Christmas lights are glowing.
But the appearance of normalcy is an illusion, because many residents say parts of their lives still are in chaos.
At Humacao School Supply in the city center, a
young girl in a plaid school uniform browses through the aisle. Store
owner Wilfredo Rodriguez reopened a week after Maria, thanks to a large
generator and a building reinforced after the island was hit in 1998 by
Hurricane Georges.
But sales at his more than two-decades old
business plummeted 50 percent in the first month and now are off 20
percent. At his home at the Palmas del Mar resort, he sees work crews,
but not the usual tourists and vacationers.
“Humacao is in crisis,” Rodriguez said. “The people are trying to get back up, but the crisis is still very much here.”
The roof of a basketball court was destroyed in Punta Santiago. Ricardo Arduengo for NBC News
Hurricane Maria’s window of opportunity
In the neighborhood of Punta Santiago, one of
the city’s poorest areas, people line up in their cars or arrive on
bicycle or foot for bags of ice handed out by P.E.C.E.S., the large Humacao non-profit.
Later, some may head a few blocks up the street to Nuestro Señora del Carmen Catholic Church for a free meal or to use the washers and dryers set up there for hurricane victims.
In the midst of the disaster, non-governmental
organizations, known as NGOs, are taking on an outsized role that is a
remarkable shift for Puerto Rico, considering such groups’ usually
subordinate role to government.
Lusiann
Iturbe Ortiz, with P.E.C.E.S., fills a bottle with purified water from
the spigot of a solar and wind powered filtration system the non-profit
purchased after Hurricane Maria to help people in the community who
three months after the storm are still without electricity and potable
water. Suzanne Gamboa / NBC News
Before the hurricane, P.E.C.E.S. largely
provided education and social services. After the hurricane, it became a
distribution center, helping get donated and government-supplied goods
to the community and continuing the work even when officials have said
the worst is over.
“Every day we have more people coming because
other (disaster) centers have closed” Oquendo said. On Dec. 5,
P.E.C.E.S. had served 431 people, a day officials considered slow.
“The federal government, FEMA, finished and the
U.S. Army that was here determined the emergency is over,” Oquendo said.
“I don’t know what it means that the emergency is over ... What happens
to the people?”
P.E.C.E.S. is now trying to find ways to use
this period to make Punta Santiago self-reliant. With a $20,000 grant,
it purchased a solar- and wind-powered water filtration system designed
by Innovative Water Technologies that can clean 5-6,000 gallons of water daily.
In the future, the group wants to bottle and
sell the water from the filtration system, create a solar power grid to
provide the community with its own power source and overhaul the Punta
Santiago drainage system that repeatedly floods.
“We have to build back better – in a stronger,
more resilient way,” said CNE’s Soto-Class, whose group has been working
with P.E.C.E.S. delivering water and supplies in Punta Santiago.
It’s a tough road ahead.
People walk along a deserted beach in Punta Santiago during what would usually be high tourist season. Ricardo Arduengo for NBC News
Puerto Rico has been reeling from a decade-long
economic crisis. Although Congress passed a law, known as PROMESA, to
repay its more than $72 billion debt, it did little to reform the
government, to start upgrading the electrical system or to stimulate
economic growth for the island.
For now, like so many others in Humacao, Dalmau
dreams of a “normal life.” He said he looks forward to the day when the
power returns, he can pour ice from his freezer, and sing the classic
Rubén Blades song “Pedro Navaja” while standing under a hot shower for
an hour.
Asked how he can be hopeful amid the despair,
Dalmau recalled a period in the island’s history when thousands died
over two years from an epidemic that hit the island.
“If from an epidemic like that, where 100,000
Puerto Ricans died, we were able to rise up, why wouldn’t we rise from
Maria?” he asked. “Claro que nos vamos a levantar!” “Of course we will
rise up.” Additional reporting by NBC contributor Istra Pacheco.
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