NYC’S STORM TROOPERS
Rotating crews bring aid to Puerto Rico Food, diapers, water flow as island still suffers
SAN JUAN — On a crowded street outside a San Juan housing complex, McCharles Bouzy had exhausted the supply of book bags in his Jeep, when he spotted one little girl left who hadn’t received one.
Bouzy rooted through the vehicle, which he also used to haul water and supplies for the children’s parents. And he came back with one more.
“That was my bag,” 40-yearold Bouzy said, after he placed it over the girl’s shoulders. He only remembered to pluck his sunglasses from the bag at the last moment. “She almost got my Oakleys.”
Bouzy, of Ozone Park, Queens, is one of 12 New York City employees still on the ground in Puerto Rico, helping San Juan recover from a storm that devastated an island already hurting from fiscal crises. City workers are doing everything from pruning trees to helping with FEMA reimbursement applications to conducting wellness checks.
Bouzy — an NYPD sergeant who works with the Office of Emergency Management — hooked up with OEM watch command supervisor Todd Callender and San Juan cops on Friday. They were checking on residents in neighborhoods that Nelson Montes, 33, a San Juan cop, identified as vulnerable. They handed out food, water, diapers and hygiene supplies.
As they have been throughout their deployment, the pair were joined by two San Juan police officers, Montes, 33, and Edgar Alizea, 43.
Just a day before, the first-responders had been at a housing complex called Villa Kennedy, which has no power. They ran out of water and had to turn away some of the residents who lined up for it. They promised to return. And they did.
Zoraida Santiago, 55, who helped organize the residents at Villa Kennedy, was happy to see them.
“The people wanted them to come, to not forget,” Santiago
The development is home to many older people, she said, including some who are bedridden.
“They can’t come down, because they’re not fit, they’re not moving,” she said. “That’s why I say first we go to people in the bed, then the other people.”
Callender, 29, of Staten Island, headed to the third-floor apartment of Julia Rivera, 86, and left a case of water on her dining room table.
Back on the street, stray cats roamed, a rooster crowed and a Rottweiler barked from behind a fence as Bouzy handed out the backpacks — some of them stuffed with crayons and coloring books — as well as food and diapers for babies.
It was one of three stops the team made that day — they’d just come from La Perla, a neighborhood below Old San Juan’s city walls that once had a reputation as an open-air drug market. The town has more recently been known as the setting for the music video of “Despacito,’ the summer hit from Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, who grew up in Villa Kennedy.
The neighborhood is only accessible by a few narrow, steep roads that cut through the city walls and head down toward the ocean — which roared up during Maria, flooding the area and wrecking cars, while the wind tore away roofs.
“The community is in need of more help. There’s no ice, there’s no drinking for water — the water is little,” said Maralan Beltran, 43. “Here the community is little boys and little girls. It’s a stress for them, the little people… There’s a lot of people who need help.”
Like at Villa Kennedy, there is no power in La Perla. The neighborhood was hit harder by the storm and is more isolated, so the team started by handing out boxes of food rations, before moving on to cases of water and bags of toiletries. The supplies are a mix of FEMA goods and donations from New York, the team said.
Before La Perla, they dropped off supplies at a women’s center associated with a church in the Country Club neighborhood — where Rosario Velez, 48, used to give out baby food and clothing to expectant mothers but now gives whatever she has to people in the neighborhood.
“Everybody’s coming in looking for a little bit of help,” she said. “People are spending a lot of money trying to survive these months.’
Bouzy and Callender are part of the sixth OEM deployment to
San Juan. They arrived on Oct. 29, and will serve a little more than two weeks before handing off their jobs to another team from the city.
“It’s going to take a lot more than my two or three weeks to see the improvement,” Bouzy said.
Residents, despite being without power for nearly two months, appear remarkably upbeat. They simply hope things will get better soon.
“Even though the storm came and battered much of Puerto Rico, from the people I do encounter, their morales are still high and they’re looking forward, to build again and become stronger,” Callender said.
In Villa Kennedy, at one point relief workers feared they might run out of water again, so they began giving out half-cases. When they ran out of other items, people offered to share. It was the opposite, Bouzy said, of lines he’d seen for new iPhones or video game releases or sneakers back in New York.
While Callender and Bouzy’s stay on the island is temporary, Montes and Alizea, the San Juan Police officers, have been escorting New York City OEM workers around and showing them which neighborhoods need help since they first started arriving. The two San Juan officers donned OEM T-shirts Friday.
“All the teams who come from NYC, I work with them and I want to thank all the people who come, because they bring all the help, all the structure,” Montes said. “So for me, maybe all the persons of San Juan and Puerto Rico, they need structure to make a new Puerto Rico.”
New York City’s current team on the ground also includes arborists from the Parks Department, who are shoring up trees damaged by the storm, and a contingent from OEM that is focused on helping San Juan, a sister city of New York, deal with FEMA.
Herman Schaffer, an assistant commissioner at OEM, said his group was mainly focused on cost recovery — helping San Juan get reimbursed for the costs of responding to the storm. That process, he said, is informed by the work OEM did after Hurricane Sandy.
“We’re still dealing with it,” he said of Sandy, from a makeshift desk in the Roberto Clemente Coliseo where his team is set up. “Recovery is a very long-term project and you really want to make sure you do it right because, if you don’t do it right, either the city is on the hook for funds that they may not have or shouldn't have to pay out, or you get a bad product — you don’t get something that’s useful to you or your city as you rebuild.”
His team at OEM will be available during that long road forward, he said.
“There’s this aspect of sister-to-sister. We have a lot of people who are coming up to New York, we have a lot of Puerto Ricans who live in New York, we have a very close relationship with San Juan and Puerto Rico,” he said. “We’re trying to honor that, to do the best we can."