This is part of a series of originally reported stories from Daily Kos on the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, communities, children and more.
What’s most important right now in Puerto Rico? This is a question worth asking because it is likely that the government and the island’s residents have very different answers. April 20 marks seven months since Hurricane Maria made landfall, sparing little in its wake. And while there have been small steps toward progress, overall, the recovery effort has been abysmal—with a series of missteps, accusations of corruption and much confusion which has endangered the lives of residents and left many without faith in the local or federal government.
Though the Puerto Rican Power Authority (PREPA) has been working to restore power to homes and businesses since September, frequent blackouts still occur. This has left Puerto Ricans in the unenviable position of having to adapt to uncertainty, inconsistency and a new normal. On April 12, a tree downed a transmission line which cut power to nearly 840,000 PREPA customers. And less than a week later, on Wednesday, an excavator downed a transmission line that cut power to the entire island, leaving all 3 million residents impacted. For those who had their power restored previously, this was yet another reminder that everyday life was still far from normal. And for others, those who’d never had their power restored, the island-wide setback plunged them further into hopelessness and feelings of abandonment.
In many ways, the status of Puerto Rico’s electrical grid represents what has become a tale of two islands. To be clear, it is not because Puerto Ricans themselves are divided amongst one another. In fact, they’ve stepped into this crisis to help one another with a spirit of resilience and tenacity that only surviving a life-altering disaster can bring. Still, there are incredibly differing experiences between those who have power and those who don’t. And there are also the countless stories of those who have left for the mainland, only to encounter tremendous hurdles in housing, employment and education. However, this divide is squarely centered around where local and federal government priorities lay and how those, ultimately, are not serving the best interest of any of the people of Puerto Rico.
Utuado
Marilyn Luciano Soto, of Rio Abajo, wasn’t looking to be a community leader. Though she had always had a way of taking care of the people in her community, she enjoyed her life as a housewife and then as an employee in a high school. When the island’s economy started to worsen, she was laid off. Rio Abajo is like an island, with no way to get in or out except for a bridge. When Maria hit, that very bridge, which connects the small, rural community to the nearby town of Utuado, was completely wiped out. This cut Rio Abajo off from everything—and forced its residents to go without food, water, supplies and help for almost two weeks. It was sometime after that when residents began to refer to the neighborhood as “El Campamento de los Olvidados,” which translates to “The Camp of the Forgotten Ones.”
When the bridge washed away, the town’s residents were forced to improvise. They created a zip-line using a cable and a shopping cart, which went from one side of the river to the other. Though the zip-line wasn’t big enough to transport people, it was just what they needed to get supplies—like rice, beans, hand sanitizer, bleach and diapers. When help finally arrived, it was from neighboring towns and representatives from Red Cross, National Guard and the local government who brought food and water. The National Guard often came with MREs (meals ready to eat) and residents didn’t know what they were and how to use them. Moreover, only a handful of people in the community spoke English so they needed to have instructions translated for them into Spanish.
That’s where Marilyn came in. Somewhere between a need for interpreters in the community to handle supply distribution and explaining to reporters why Rio Abajo was cut off from the rest of the world, Marilyn found that she was drafted by her neighbors to step up and serve others.
Marilyn recently spoke to Daily Kos by phone and communicated by text several times over the course of a month. She shared her story and the lasting impact that Hurricane Maria has had on Rio Abajo. She explained:
“Never in my life did I think I was going to be a leader. But 10 or 12 days after Maria, the community decided I was going to be a leader. I knew English and how to respond to the community. Originally, my family wanted me to go [leave the island altogether], but I didn’t want to go … I felt like I would be leaving people behind. I think God chose me to be a leader. I think it was written somewhere that I had to do this.”
Marilyn took a role in coordinating all the supplies and donations that were brought to the community. Once they reached their side of the river in the shopping cart, she and others took them to Chapel San Jose (a church) where they opened them up and distributed them. Using a book to carefully document everything, the supplies were divided among the 25 families in the community. Families quickly learned to take only what they needed. If they had extra bottled water, they gave it away. And some chose to drink water from a natural spring. They shared generator power and took care of one another. Marilyn acknowledges that the supplies were not distributed equally—and this was dependent on the family and their needs.
“Sometimes we’d have three cans of milk. And those needed to be given to families with kids. Adults can live for a few days with hunger. Kids don’t understand what’s happening. So we needed to think about the kids first.”
All of this was happening while there were numerous attempts to rebuild the bridge that had been washed away. Unfortunately, this took way longer than anyone expected. While FEMA worked on construction and was able to erect a temporary solution, every time it rained and the river became flooded, the bridge washed away. As construction companies came from across the United States to bring supplies, Marilyn took a job with one of them. She used her English speaking and computer skills—working her way from a construction flagger to secretary. It is a job she still holds. It took six months in total for the bridge to be completed, with the inauguration of the new bridge taking place on March 13, 2018. This was a bittersweet victory. While Rio Abajo is no longer disconnected from the world, as of April 19, it remains without power.
When Thursday’s power outage occurred, Marilyn said the following:
“I just heard about the outage on the radio because it has been seven months without power. This is very horrible and frustrating at the same time because you don’t see anyone working from the power authority. … Not just that, but we are almost around to the next hurricane season.”
San Juan
On Thursday night, while the power was out across the island, one place that had lights was the Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan. This is because there were two major league baseball games taking place there this week. As written in The New York Times:
“The major league baseball games this week between the Minnesota Twins and Cleveland Indians here had dual goals: to affirm the Puerto Rican government’s position that the island was open for business again after the devastation of Hurricane Maria seven months ago, and to showcase this American territory’s unique relationship with baseball. [...]
The second and final game went on — the mayor of San Juan promised it would — but sitting in the stands on Wednesday, it was hard to miss the disparity: running on generators earlier in the day, Estadio Hiram Bithorn, the storied stadium where the games were played, was back on the power grid by game time, while across the highway, apartment buildings and businesses disappeared in the dark, save for a few lit windows.”
This exemplifies the tale of two islands. While Rio Abajo remains in darkness without any sign of power in the coming days or months, the baseball stadium and tourist districts have reopened for business, trying to draw visitors to the island. This is good for local business owners and certainly good for a government that is struggling to rebuild an island and pay off massive debt to creditors. But it hasn’t resulted in plans to address an unstable infrastructure that was in decay long before Hurricane Maria. And it most certainly has not resulted in help to the most vulnerable residents in need.
Those who have had power since Maria took this latest outage somewhat in stride. Alejandro Calaf, the founder of Water for Puerto Rico, whose story and organization Daily Kos covered in November, was confident that Puerto Ricans would find a way to manage during this most recent blackout. He was worried, however, about its impact on the mental health of a population already stretched and stressed from living through the endlessly slow disaster recovery process.
By text, Calaf wrote:
“All power outages are annoying to say the least, but while folks have survived for months without power, a lot of my friends are saying that this brings back PTSD. Not literally, but more like the 100-plus days where a lot of them were living in apartments with no water or power.”
Moving forward
When the power is eventually restored (at least to those who had service earlier in the week), there will be other critical issues that need to be addressed. Home foreclosures on federally insured mortgages in Puerto Rico are scheduled to begin after May 18—though not without a fight. New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has written a letter requesting that Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson issue a moratorium on the foreclosures for an entire year.
The New York Post reports:
“It is apparent that the residential mortgage delinquency and foreclosure problems in Puerto Rico, which resulted in large part from the widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Maria in late 2017, are unlikely to change significantly during that time,” he wrote of the May 18 deadline.
“Extending that moratorium by one year would allow a more realistic amount of time for property owners to achieve a measure of normalcy that could allow them to resume living in their homes and paying their mortgages.”
And in addition to the potential housing crisis that mass foreclosures would cause, there is still the issue of Puerto Rico’s failing economy—which has seen a boost with disaster recovery funding but continues to face tremendous challenges in the coming years. The island’s current debt totals $120 billion, which includes outstanding pension obligations. And the federal oversight board, which is in charge of directing fiscal and economic reform, has suggested more cutbacks that could result in losses to pensions and compensation for workers in both the public and private sectors.
Getting back to normal life in Puerto Rico will take years, if not decades. And it will require the government to do more than promote tourism or baseball games. It requires the government to prioritize the needs of residents and invest in fixing the island’s crumbling infrastructure and economy once and for all. Many lives are dependent on it. After all, the residents of Rio Abajo are still waiting, after seven months, for the lights to come back on. And yet they, like most Puerto Ricans, remain determined and able to find appreciation in the things that are working and allow them to be connected to the outside world. As Marilyn Luciano Soto said last month: “I am very grateful that at least now I have a bridge to cross and am able to walk to the other side.”
To learn more about helping the residents of Rio Abajo, send an email to: kelly@dailykos.com.