City pols see some P.R. progress
LUQUILLO, Puerto Rico — Five weeks before Hurricane Maria hit, City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer and his husband, Dan Hendrick, bought a condo in Luquillo, a spot that would be their “happy place” about 40 minutes away from where Hendrick had proposed in San Juan.
Seven weeks after landfall, the couple made their second poststorm trip to a place that didn’t feel so happy, but where they wanted to do their part to help.
“Some of the best memories in our lives have been crafted here, and our love for the island and for the people is very genuine and we were like, we have to go,” he said.
On their trip last month, they brought four bags of supplies, many of them solar-powered lights. The situation on the ground then was devastating, Van Bramer said, and he was nervous to return this month.
“When we got on the plane coming down here, I was like, the thing that I’m most afraid of is that there won’t be any progress, we won’t see any progress, and that would be crushing,” he said Thursday. “There has been progress.”
Cell phone service is spotty but improved, and while the complex their condo is in has no power, some street lights are on and a couple of businesses were opening their doors for the first time this week.
Still, reminders of what happened are everywhere. Cars are totalled in the parking lot, where they were blown around by wind — several of them crashed into a massive retaining wall and crumbled it. The area, which Van Bramer said once bustled with children at play, felt positively deserted.
Diego Garcia was working the security desk Thursday, as he was when the storm hit. Along with several cats and a few residents huddled into a windowless, closet-sized break room to get away from the wind and water that seemed determined to get inside any way it could.
“Remember that scene in Titanic, when everything started to blow up?” he asked. “That was exactly how it felt.”
When it was finally over, Garcia went home to his town, Ceiba. Afraid that his metal roof would be shorn away by wind, he had placed everything of value — including his microwave — into his car.
“When I was driving home to Ceiba an electric pole fell on my car,” he said. “My car was totaled.”
But he was all right — and waited eight hours in the car, afraid to leave his belongings, until a tow truck could bring him home. In his neighborhood, he saw other homes destroyed and feared the worst — but his home was untouched.
“I was so surprised about it I even kneeled in front of the house, surprised, crying,” he said. “I just thought the worst.”
Signs of the storm are also still obvious downtown in Luquillo, which is about 40 minutes from San Juan and sandwiched between beautiful curving coastline and the famous Yunque rain forest. On a balcony of the City Hall, Mayor Jesus Marquez Rodriguez paced on the roof, taking a phone call.
“After all of these days, 60% of the population of my town Luquillo, they are not receiving water service. Everyone is concerned about the electric service, but everybody knows that it’s a thing that happened due to the hurricane,” he said. “But water service is life. Water is life.” SAN JUAN — Nearly two months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, portions of it were plunged back into darkness Thursday — which officials said underscores the fragility of the island’s halting recovery. The level of power generated on the island plummeted from 43.2% in the morning to 18% in the afternoon, after the failure of a power line that had been managed by controversial energy company Whitefish — knocking out power to areas in and around San Juan. “Right now the Trump administration is already talking about pulling back because the country is as they call it stabilizing. Today we lost all of our power again, as if it was day one,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz told the Daily News. “So how stable can it be when you can’t know for sure whether you will have power one day or not?” Cruz spoke with the Daily News in the Rio Piedras neighborhood, where she met with New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito — who is leading a delegation of Council members to do relief work.