Puerto Rico begins rebuilding
Firefighters remove trees, use bulldozers to lift toppled concrete light posts
Rescuers fanned out to reach stunned victims Thursday after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, knocking out electricity to the entire island and triggering landslides and floods.
The extent of the damage is unknown given that dozens of municipalities remained isolated and without communication after Maria hit the island Wednesday morning as a Category 4 storm with 155 m.p.h. winds, the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in over 80 years.
Uprooted trees and widespread flooding blocked many highways and streets across the island, creating a maze that forced drivers to go against traffic and past police cars that used loudspeakers to warn people they must respect a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew imposed by the governor to ensure everyone’s safety.
“This is going to be a historic event for Puerto Rico,” said Abner Gomez, the island’s emergency management director.
President Donald Trump approved a federal disaster declaration for Puerto Rico.
Previously a Category 5 with 281 km/h winds, Maria hit Puerto Rico as the third-strongest storm to make landfall in the U.S., based on its central pressure.
It was even stronger than Hurricane Irma when that storm roared into the Florida Keys earlier this month.
In the capital of San Juan, towering eucalyptus trees fell nearly every other block over a main road dotted with popular bars, restaurants and coffee shops, some of which were damaged.
Outside a nearby apartment building, 40-year-old tourism company operator Adrian Pacheco recounted how he spent eight hours in a stairwell huddled with 100 other residents when
the hurricane ripped the storm shutters off his building and decimated three balconies.
“I think people didn’t expect the storm to reach the point that it did,” he said. “Since Irma never really happened, they thought Maria would be the same.”
Hurricane Irma sideswiped Puerto Rico on Sept. 6, leaving more than one million people without power but causing no deaths or widespread damage like it did on nearby islands. Maria, however, blew out windows at some hospitals and police stations, turned some streets into roaring rivers and destroyed hundreds of homes across Puerto Rico, including 80 per cent of houses in a small fishing community near the San Juan Bay, which unleashed a storm surge of more than four feet.
“Months and months and months and months are going to
pass before we can recover from this,” Felix Delgado, mayor of the northern coastal city of Catano, told The Associated Press.
The sound of chain saws began to fill the silence that spread across San Juan late Wednesday afternoon as firefighters began to remove trees and used small bulldozers to lift toppled concrete light posts. Some neighbours pitched in to help clear the smaller branches, including Shawn Zimmerman, a 27-year-old student from Lewistown, Penn., who moved to Puerto Rico nearly two years ago.
“The storm didn’t bother me,” he said. “It’s the devastation. I get goosebumps. It’s going to take us a long time.”
Maria has caused at least 10 deaths across the Caribbean, including seven in the hard-hit island of Dominica and two in
the French Caribbean territory of Guadeloupe. Puerto Rico’s governor told CNN one man died after being hit by flying debris. No further details were available, and officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
Dominica Tourism Minister Robert Tonge described his badly damaged country three days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in the eastern Caribbean island.
An update from him said the capital of Roseau still had severe flooding and there was heavy damage throughout the city. The hospital and a community centre both lost roofs.
One of two airports serving the country was inoperable while the other was expected to be operational in the coming days. An estimated 95 per cent of the roofs were blown off in some towns, including Mahaut and Portsmouth.