DAY OF DISASTER
Maria leaves P.R. 100% powerless 200+ dead in Mexico City quake And after all that, an eruption
A grim search for victims of the 7.1 earthquake that hit Mexico City began yesterday as Puerto Rico suffered a direct hit from Category 4 Hurricane Maria.
Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico with 155-mph winds and at least 20 inches of rain on Wednesday, knocking out power to the entire island and turning streets into raging rivers.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz said her city is now a shell of its former self.
“The Puerto Rico and the San Juan that we knew yesterday is no longer there,” she told NBC News.
The massive damage was apparent from the moment first responders were able to survey the devastation.
“Once we’re able to go outside, we’re going to find our island destroyed,” said Abner Gomez, Puerto Rico’s emergency-management director.
“The information we have received is not encouraging. It’s a system that has destroyed everything in its path.”
Maria left nine dead as it raged across the Caribbean on Monday and Tuesday, before making landfall in the Puerto Rican town of Yabucoa as a Category 4 storm early Wednesday.
It was the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico, home to 3.4 million people, in more than 80 years — and officials warned that much of the island would have to be rebuilt.
The US territory was entirely without power early Wednesday afternoon, and it could take months for some residents to regain electricity.
“We’re looking at four to six months without electricity” in all of Puerto Rico, Cruz said.
Maria ripped the roofs off count- less buildings, uprooted trees and unleashed massive flooding that submerged homes and cars. Entire residential streets were consumed by swift-moving water.
Those who hunkered down in their homes huddled in closets and hallways as the monster storm raged, while thousands of others sought refuge in shelters.
“This is total devastation,” Carlos Mercader, a spokesman for Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, told CNN. “Puerto Rico, in terms of the infrastructure, will not be the same . . . This is something of historic proportions.”
Felix Delgado, mayor of the northern coastal city of Catano, said that 80 percent of homes in a neighborhood called Juana Matos had been decimated.
“Months and months and months and months are going to pass before we can recover from this,” he said.
Rosselló urged residents to have faith that the island, which is already in the midst of a financial crisis, would recover.
He imposed a curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. to keep streets clear and protect residents.
“We are stronger than any hurricane. Together, we will rebuild,” he said.
Rosita Galguerra, 66, who was riding out the storm with her husband in the Rio Piedras neighborhood of San Juan, described the hurricane’s wrath as “incredible.”
“The rain is horizontal and all the trees are on the ground,” she told The Miami Herald. “The house is trembling — and my house is made of concrete with a concrete roof. The winds are like out of a horror movie and it’s gusts, gusts, gusts.”
Mayra Febles de Carerro said her apartment building near Old San Juan was “swaying back and forth,” and when she peeked outside, it “looked like someone took a trimmer to all the vegetation.”
“After 4 a.m., the winds got really bad. The stronger the winds, the more the building was shaking. It was really scary,” she told NBC News.
By Wednesday evening, Maria had weakened to a Category 2 hurricane with still-destructive winds of nearly 110 mph as it moved toward the northeastern coast of the Dominican Republic.
That nation shut down most of its port operations on Wednesday in anticipation of taking a hit from the hurricane.
“Some strengthening is forecast during the next day or two, and Maria could regain major hurricane status by Thursday,” the National Hurricane Center said.
While no deaths had been reported in Puerto Rico on Wednesday, Maria killed at least nine people in the Caribbean, where it directly hit the small island of Dominica as a Category 5 storm.
Seven people died on Dominica, and two others were killed on the French island of Guadeloupe.
Aerial footage showed devastating damage to Dominica, which suffered a “tremendous loss of housing and public buildings” when Maria made landfall, according to Hartley Henry, an adviser to Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit.
“Many buildings serving as shelters lost roofs, which means that a very urgent need now is tarpaulins and other roofing materials,” Henry wrote on Facebook.
Maria’s eye also passed the US Virgin Islands late Tuesday, pounding St. Croix with fierce winds and rain.
While the storm damaged homes and caused flooding, Lauren Lefebre, FEMA’s external-affairs officer, said that initial assessments suggested that Hurricane Irma was more destructive to the USVI than Maria was.
“It’s not as bad as St. Thomas was post-Irma,” she said of St. Croix.
The White House praised FEMA and Homeland Security for their ongoing efforts “to protect the people of the United States territories affected by Hurricane Maria and to support response and recovery efforts with respect to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.”