Texas-based military lends a hand to FEMA
Response team attempts to shore collapsing dam
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter banked left, and Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan stared at this island’s mountainous landscape, his chin resting on one hand.
He said little — inaudible under the roar of rotors — but even after seeing the devastation for six days, it still amazed him, he acknowledged later.
Rural roads now were visibly clear of mudslides and debris two weeks after Hurricane Maria chewed up the island, a major hurdle overcome for military and civilian disaster response teams.
That afternoon, Buchanan huddled with his staff on more pressing problems, listening to a situation report that had a
grim streak to balance the progress made.
Fixing the island’s shattered power grid, they agreed, would take months. The more urgent question was how fast they could shore up a dam in danger of collapsing northwest of San Juan. The territorial government had ordered 70,000 people downstream to evacuate, but it wasn’t clear how many had left.
As a stop-gap to prevent erosion, Army and Marine helicopters were dropping concrete barriers and sand bags into a weakened area near the dam. The Air Force needed to fly in large pumps and pipes to help divert the water and relieve pressure caused by heavy rains from the hurricane and subsequent daily cloudbursts.
It was Wednesday afternoon. Buchanan and his staff needed to know the size of the pumps and pipes so the right cargo planes could get them to Puerto Rico in time to save the dam.
“Let’s be relentless in making that happen,” he said.
As commander of U.S. Army North at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, Buchanan leads American military forces responding to the devastation here and in the Virgin Islands. If relatively obscure to many people, Army North now is in a critical role.
It’s the very mission for which this command was built.
Moving resources
Buchanan leads the Joint Force Land Component of the U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas and the Arctic Circle. In that capacity, he’s coordinating the movement of military units, equipment and supplies to Puerto Rico from Texas and elsewhere.
He arrived Sept. 28 amid a growing military footprint. Just how long he’ll head that mission isn’t clear, but it might be awhile. This disaster is the biggest his command ever has faced — and it’s already the third one this year.
Buchanan, who served multiple tours in Iraq, was deeply involved in the military’s support of FEMA and the Texas National Guard after Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast in August, then oversaw the flow of troops and supplies to Florida in the wake of Hurricane Irma.
Army North also has assisted the U.S. Virgin Islands, struck first by Irma, then Maria.
When Buchanan headed to the commonweath, some stories made it sound as if he were directing the entire operation. He’s more of a facilitator, using the Pentagon’s airlift assets to deliver vital equipment, fuel trucks and generators, food, water and medical care to back up FEMA and the local government.
The National Guard’s deputy adjutant general, Brig. Gen. Jose Reyes, is the one moving troops around the island.
But Army North has resources no one else has, particularly medical units such as critical care air transport teams and many of cargo planes, including C-5M Super Galaxy jets that have flown out of Joint Base San AntonioLackland. The command has roughly tripled its number of personnel and Black Hawks in its first two weeks in Puerto Rico. By Friday, there were more than 12,000 troops on the ground, with more en route.
The battle rhythm in Buchanan’s second-floor convention center suite is more like a busy corporate office than the big, sleepless circus tent that division commanders use in war. From there, his staff reaches out to units and private companies across the United States.
Buchanan is 58, of Sierra Vista, Ariz. As the face of the U.S. military’s response to the crisis, he stands in his utility uniform with Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló at daily news conferences.
“I’ve got a lot of experience on deployments, and I’ve learned that I’m not really paid for my back strength anymore. I’m paid for my mind, and if I can’t keep my mind sharp, then I’m doing everybody a disservice,” Buchanan said. “For me, that means I have to get a decent night’s sleep, and so I try to get seven hours a night. This is more than I used to get, but I’m older than I used be, and that makes the difference for me.”
Tide of troubles
The Pentagon response since his arrival here is helping, but many of the island’s 3.4 million people have been mired in misery since Maria made landfall Sept. 20. Nine in 10 households have no electricity. Drinking water is in short supply.
The specter of epidemics still looms. News reports have detailed stories of impoverished people drinking filthy water and scrounging for food, especially in Puerto Rico’s interior, where roads were cut off until last week.
There is desperation in middle-class neighborhoods just a 25-minute drive from Buchanan’s headquarters.
Divorced, diabetic, out of money and blood pressure medication, Mariantoinette Dominguez, 36, was rationing her insulin and preparing for a flight to Orlando, Fla., to start over.
“I’ve been here 18 years, and I love Puerto Rico, but it’s time to leave,” Dominguez said in her warm, humid apartment as her boys, 5 and 12, played outside in the town of Carolina. “I can’t take this.”
In San Juan, the return of a semblance of normalcy is measured by traffic jams and the city’s vibrant night life. Yet even though clubs and restaurants are back in business, internet connectivity is spotty and limited to guests at the biggest hotels.
Power plants are in good shape, but the electrical grid is mostly down. Cops, not lights, direct traffic in parts of the city. Hotels and hospitals run on large generators.
Taxi driver Frank Pérez is back at work, but not all is well in his world. His home was flooded in the storm, though he did get help from FEMA.
“Five hundred,” Pérez said, raising his fingers.
Some residents said they had seen no FEMA officials.
The fact that Puerto Rico is surrounded by water doesn’t help recovery efforts. Buchanan noted that Harvey dumped heavy rainfall on the Beaumont and Orange areas after hovering over Houston. With parts of Interstate 10 west of Beaumont under water, people headed east toward Louisiana, where Fort Polk soldiers came to their aid.
“The problem here is, there is no Louisiana. We’re surrounded by a thousand miles of ocean,” he said.
Saving the dam
Guajataca Dam is a good example of that problem. In Wednesday’s staff meeting, Buchanan’s team worked to procure the right pumps and pipes needed to divert water from the reservoir, brainstorming questions that sometimes had no immediate answer.
The team was told that the dam was operating as it should but that erosion underneath the spillway’s concrete slabs had caused them to fall, one after the other. If the erosion compromised the dam’s integrity, 100,000 people could lose their only source of drinking water, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ José Sánchez told Buchanan.
“Sir, actually, that’s really the fear, of losing the dam,” Sánchez said.
The logistics of getting pipe to Puerto Rico were as daunting as actually installing it. There was an assumption — but not 100 percent certainty — that the pipes should be 24 inches in diameter. Army Col. James DeLapp, an engineer, said 10,000 feet of the pipe would be needed, prompting a brief discussion about how many planes would be needed to fly it there.
“Once we get the materials in hand, this would probably be a week to 10 days to do,” DeLapp said.
Buchanan’s team then turned its attention to the pumps. They considered trucking them to the area versus flying them in, perhaps with a CH-47 Chinook or MH-53 Super Stallion. That prompted a few nuts-and-bolts questions.
“How much does it weigh?” asked Buchanan, an infantryman by trade. DeLapp didn’t know. “Let’s find out,” Buchanan said.
Two minutes later, the lights briefly went out in the room, a common occurrence for the relatively few buildings that have power in Puerto Rico. Rosselló, the governor, has estimated that only a quarter of the island might have its lights on by the end of the month.
Choosing which pumps to buy, signing the contracts, lining up Air Mobility Command to fly them to Puerto Rico and installing them is in Army North’s hands and had not been finalized by the end of the week. How long the dam could hold was a matter of conjecture.
In all, 500 barriers will be used to shore up the section that is eroding and more than 1,800 bags of sand and rock will shore up the base of the spillway.
Sánchez said the goal is to finish that part of the project in two weeks. Asked if a disaster could be averted for that long, he replied, “Everything’s possible.”
The weather still is a wild card.
The storm ahead
Hurricane Maria brought a lot of rain to the region, along with 155mph winds that ripped trees out of the ground and stripped branches of foliage, leaving entire mountain ranges looking like muddy wastelands. The rain hasn’t stopped. Brief, intense downpours occur regularly, with 1 to 2 inches a day and sometimes twice that, swelling the lake.
Another slide popped up on the screen as the briefing continued. “Tropical Depression Nate,” it said.
Buchanan can call on more troops if necessary, but the operation in Puerto Rico is all consuming and far from over. He can’t say when it will end.
Over time, the U.S. government will hand over more responsibility for recovery operations to state and guard authorities. Ships and helicopter support coming from those vessels probably will leave first, followed by some Army aircraft.
Military hospitals might stay the longest.
“Now I’ll just give you a window. For Texas, on the federal-military side, we were probably involved for two weeks. I’m trying to remember, but that was at most about two weeks. We’ve already been in the Virgin Islands for more than a month right now,” Buchanan said.
“And so for here, it’s going to be a while. I don’t have the exact timeline, but it’s based on the conditions, not a time. When the work is done, we’ll go back.”