In dark, Puerto Ricans mark Christmas
Storm-hit islanders celebrate best they can; power still months away for some
A day before Christmas and three months after Hurricane Maria made landfall, parts of Puerto Rico are still without water, and more than 1 million people are in the dark. Hundreds of residents remain in shelters, unable to return home. Schools that have been able to resume classes are still without electricity.
But in towns around the island, residents are working to keep holiday traditions alive.
A group of friends in Guaynabo arrived at the home of Juan Pablo Gonzalez for a parranda, a Puerto Rican Christmas tradition that brings friends together to sing carols, usually in the middle of the night. Gonzalez’s home was still without power, so people used cellphones and flashlights to see one another and read song lyrics.
“I couldn’t allow the pessimism that is everywhere, that is covering us, to also wither the culture, the traditions,” said Lorraine Martinez, one of the singers. “We bring our happiness.”
In Old San Juan, Marta Cirino performed Christmas songs with Caiko y Los del Soberao, an Afro-Puerto Rican music group. The neighWEST
borhood is usually crowded with tourists, but on a recent night, it was full of locals who sang and danced to the music.
“At the beginning, I thought there was not going to be Christmas,” said Franklin Lanzo, the musical director of the group, who lost his home during the storm. “But these are things that happen, and I was not going to stop for it.”
The Eugenio Maria de Hostos School in Canovanas has been used as a shelter for weeks and is currently home to 94 people. Mildred Rodriguez, a resident at the shelter, set up an artificial Christmas tree salvaged from the debris at her home and decorated it with what she could find.
“We are not going to have a Christmas, at least me,” said Ana J. Almarante Vazquez, a resident at the shelter. “I am far away from my family. I don’t have anyone else here. What good time am I going to have?”
Workers cleaned and decorated the Escuela del Pueblo Trabajador, a Montessori institution near Trujillo Alto.
The school decided to continue a decades-long tradition and hold a holiday
celebration for the children after parents asked for it. The area has been without power since Hurricane Irma made landfall a few weeks before Maria swept over the island, but the school reopened in early October.
In previous years, only one Puerto Rican flag would hang near the Three Kings altar at the school, but this year dozens of flags were integrated in the decoration. The academic director of the school, Marlyn Souffront, wanted to focus on reaffirming the island’s cultural identity.
“People are depressed and have suffered all their losses, and need a moment and a space where they could celebrate,” Souffront said. “So we decided we were going to do it.”
IT’S SLOW-GOING
Most of the island will have power by the end of February, said Gen. Diana Holland, commander of the South Atlantic Division of the Army Corps of Engineers. But the last stretch, the hard-to-reach rural areas, will not get power until the end of May, eight months after Maria swept the island and just in time for the 2018 hurricane season.
“Our power grid has never seen anything like this,” said Justo Gonzalez, the interim director of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.
The Army Corps said the areas that were expected to take the longest to get electrical power restored were the central towns of Lares, Utuado and Adjuntas — together home to about 80,000 people.
Power restoration is taking so long because of “the sheer amount of work,” said Jose Sanchez, an engineer at the Corps who leads the power restoration task force. “The first time I saw it, I thought: ‘This is going to take a long time.’”
The damage to an already outdated and poorly maintained electrical grid was comprehensive. Lines went down, poles snapped, towers fell and substations flooded. There are 30,000 miles of electrical line in Puerto Rico, and about 63 percent of it was affected.
To underscore the scope of the work: Almost 50,000 power poles need to be repaired or replaced, along with 500 towers. And the towers are so heavy that helicopters cannot lift them, so they have to be installed in stages. It can take up to 10 days just to finish one.
And some of the supplies, such as the 30,000 power poles that were ordered Oct. 6 — 16 days after the storm — are beginning to arrive only now. Some 400 miles of cable are expected to reach the island in the next two weeks, Gonzalez said.
Many of the items simply take a long time to manufacture, ship and offload, Holland explained.
“The thing that challenges every mission that we’re doing here has been the logistics, the materials, just the physics of getting here,” she said.
Puerto Rico has struggled to obtain enough transformers, electrical fittings and electrical insulators, according to the power authority — to the point that crews have been assigned to recycle existing materials while they wait for new ones to arrive.
That means uninstalling equipment from one place, certifying that it works and installing it somewhere else, without taking power away from the first location to light up the second. That process is inefficient, Gonzalez said.
“We have crews,” Gonzalez said. “What we really need are materials.”
The power grid is so damaged that authorities would not even venture to guess how many people on the island lack electricity.
The apparatus that allows the agency to know which customers have power, known as the outage management system, has been giving readings that are so out of whack that nobody trusts them to be true, Sanchez said. So the government instead has been reporting how much power is being generated.
That number has fluctuated around 65 percent for weeks now. But because critical areas like hospitals and water treatment plants that consume a lot of power were energized first, this does not mean 65 percent of households have power.
The generation amount has stalled, Gonzalez said, because people are using less power as the weather cools and businesses and schools close for the holidays.
On Friday, Gonzalez said 73 of the island’s 78 municipalities had some sort of power, even if it comes from generators installed by the Army Corps of Engineers to create temporary power microgrids. Sanchez put the number of cities with electricity at about 55.