MARIA KILLED MY DAD
City woman puts blame on medical crisis ‘Everything collapsed:’ A survivor’s tale
SAN JUAN — Mili Bonilla remembers walking hand in hand with her father as a little girl growing up in the Bronx. They remained close as she grew older, speaking on the phone daily. When he moved back to Puerto Rico in the 1970s, she would visit him for father-daughter beach excursions and to enjoy his succulent pork loin.
Jose Maria Bonilla died on Oct. 27, one month and seven days after Hurricane Maria slammed the island with 155-mph winds, causing the largest power outage in U.S. history.
He was a healthy 87-year-old who, before October, had been hospitalized just once — when he broke his hip stepping over a small cat, Bonilla, 62, said.
“He was active. He ran around, drove, went shopping, cooked, saw friends, drank beer and played dominoes,” she told the Daily News days before the storm’s one-year anniversary, which comes Thursday.
Two days after the hurricane, Jose developed respiratory issues, which turned into pneumonia.
When he arrived at Doctors’ Central Hospital in Bayamon, medical staff told him he should leave Puerto Rico because the island-wide blackout had limited hospitals’ operational capacity.
“They told him he should go to the U.S. to seek treatment,” Bonilla said.
But Jose didn’t want to travel, and stayed on the island, where he expected he would soon recover.
“It’s not easy to get on a plane and get out of here,” Bonilla added.
He remained on a ventilator until the hospital ran out of oxygen, according to Bonilla. He was then transferred to Hospital Hermanos Melendez where, days later, he took his last breath.
Obstructed roads, disabled bottling centers and the inability to communicate the need for critical supplies can all impair the availability of oxygen in hospitals following a disaster.
“The oxygen supply chains get disrupted and it’s a major problem,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
Bonilla is sure the government’s response to Maria on Puerto Rico cost her father his life.
“I believe that if it wasn’t for the limitations that everyone had — not just the hospitals, there were so many — for my father, things would have turned out different,” she said.
A George Washington University study commissioned by the Puerto Rican government found that an estimated 2,975 people died in the hurricane’s aftermath. The revised death toll was nearly 50 times the government’s earlier estimate of 64.
Gov. Ricardo Rossello accepted the results.
“This shows the magnitude of the catastrophe,” he told El Nuevo Dia newspaper last month.
Independent experts also back the study’s findings, adding that the death toll is likely to increase. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets updated to at least 4,000 by the end of the year,” Redlener
said.
President Trump refuses to acknowledge thousands of lives lost on his watch. “3,000 people did not die” from the storm, he tweeted Sept. 13, accusing Democrats of inflating the number “to make me look as bad as possible.”
“It’s such an affront to people who lost loved ones,” Bonilla said of Trump’s .tweet.
Embattled FEMA Administrator Brock Long echoed the President’s remarks, suggesting some of the deaths linked to the storm were actually caused by domestic violence.
“You can’t blame spousal abuse after a disaster on anybody,” he said on “Meet the Press.”
Trump delivered more callous remarks Wednesday when he visited the Carolinas, where Hurricane Florence killed at least 37 people, telling victims to “have a good time” as he passed out supplies.
Eduviges Roque is another Puerto Rican whose death was blamed on the hurricane.
She suffered from pulmonary fibrosis and was living with her jewelry designer daughter, Luisa, in Vega Baja, when the hurricane knocked out the family’s power and water supplies.
She, too, was discouraged from entering island hospitals.
“The conditions were terrible. I avoided taking her in because I knew that as soon as she walked through the door, I would lose her right away. I was worried about the bacteria because she was fragile,” Luisa, 50, said.
They borrowed a neighbor’s generator so that Roque could stay connected to an oxygen concentrator and receive respiratory therapy.
But Luisa struggled to decontaminate their home after it was flooded with rainwater, causing her mother’s condition to worsen.
“I could see her deteriorating,” Luisa said.
Roque died on Nov. 22, 2017, at age 77. “She was a warrior but she wasn’t able to last in the conditions,” her daughter said.
Other families are still searching for relatives who disappeared in the days after the storm.
It has been more than a year since Juan Basques Rodriguez, 58, saw his younger brother, Adan.
The brothers lived with their sister, Milagros, in a cluster of three homes in Yabucoa.
Juan was home the day the hurricane hit, but doesn’t know if Adan — who was an alcoholic — weathered the storm.
“He never came back, and I know nothing of his whereabouts,” Juan told The News in Spanish.
“I’ve searched hospitals, been to the police, forensic services, but nobody knows anything,” he said.
Juan reflected on spending the past year without his brother.
“He was my companion and my son’s godfather. We loved him,” he said through tears.
The siblings say it’s agonizing not knowing for certain what happened to their brother.
“Everything is on hold,” Milagros said. “We don’t even know if he is dead or alive,” she said.
“It’s not easy that it’s the anniversary. By now, we would like some concrete news. None of the authorities have told us anything.”