Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Puerto Rico pummeled as Maria blows through
Emergency chief: Island totally without power
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Hurricane Maria raked across Puerto Rico on Wednesday as the most powerful storm to strike the island in more than 80 years, ripping roofs off buildings, filling homes with water and knocking out power to the entire population.
“Definitely Puerto Rico — when we can get outside — we will find our island destroyed,” Puerto Rico’s emergency management director, Abner Gomez, said at a midday news conference, adding that 100 percent of the island is without electricity. “The information we have received is not encouraging. It’s a system that has destroyed everything it has had in its path.”
There were no immediate reports of any deaths or serious injuries on the island. As of Wednesday night, the storm had killed at least nine people across the Caribbean.
The storm first slammed the Puerto Rican coast near Yabucoa at 6:15 a.m. with 155 mph winds, making it the first Category 4 hurricane to directly strike the island since 1932. By midmorning, Maria had fully engulfed the 100-mile-long island as winds snapped palm trees, peeled off rooftops and sent debris skidding across beaches and roads. By afternoon, the intense gusts had become less frequent and the lashing rains eased, giving residents their first glimpse of the storm’s wake.
As of Wednesday evening, Maria had weakened into a Category 2 hurricane with winds of 110 mph. It was centered just off the northwestern corner of Puerto Rico, moving at 12 mph.
It was expected to pass off the northeastern coast of the Dominican Republic late Wednesday and today.
Gov. Ricardo Rossello imposed a curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. daily until Saturday to allow rescue crews and officials to respond to the hurricane’s aftermath.
“We are at a critical moment in the effort to help thousands of Puerto Ricans that urgently need aid and to assess the great damage caused by Hurricane Maria,” he said. “Maintaining public order will be essential.”
The storm unloaded at least 20 inches of rain in some areas, and floodwaters
inundated homes, even those far from shore that had never seen flooding before. The emergency room of a hospital in Bayamon was flooded, forcing the staff to move patients to a safer area.
In a community in Catano, 80 percent of the structures were destroyed, Mayor Felix Delgado said. “Months and months and months and months are going to pass before we can recover from this,” he said.
People seeking help were told by authorities that they would have to sit tight until conditions improved. Among them were a family in Guayama pleading for help from their home because of water up to the height of their cabinets, and a woman in Hato Rey saying she was experiencing labor pains.
“Unfortunately, our staff cannot leave,” Gomez said at the news conference. “They will be rescued later.”
Before striking Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria made landfall on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Rep. Stacey Plaskett, who represents the Virgin Islands in the U.S. House, said St. Croix had been a staging ground for relief efforts after Hurricane Irma devastated other parts of her district just days ago. Then Tuesday night, Maria slammed St. Croix directly as a Category 5 storm, with winds of 175 mph, and moved slowly across the island.
The damage has yet to be fully assessed, she said, but in a sign of the possible devastation, the roof of the local racetrack blew into the runway of the airport, complicating relief efforts.
“We’re just now getting an assessment from [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] and others,” she said Wednesday afternoon. “There’s still rain going down there.”
Puerto Rico’s vulnerability to tropical storms has been driven home in the past two weeks as first Irma and then Maria have howled into the Caribbean. Because of the back-to-back storms, about 3,200 federal government workers, National Guardsmen and other emergency personnel overseen by FEMA were already in Puerto Rico, many of them dealing with the Irma response and recovery.
“Right now we’re in waitand-see mode,” FEMA Administrator Brock Long said Wednesday afternoon. “We know that St. Croix took a tremendous hit, and we know obviously Puerto Rico took the brunt of the storm. Once the weather clears and the seas die down, we’ll be in full operation.”
The federal recovery effort, he said, will attempt to restore power to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as quickly as possible but in a way that makes the grid less vulnerable to similar disruptions.
The power grid, he said, “is a fragile system in both territories. It’s going to be a long and frustrating process to get the power grid up.”
Speaking on NBC’s Today show Wednesday morning, Rossello said buildings that meet the island’s newer construction codes, established around 2011, would be able to weather the winds. But wooden homes in flood-prone areas “have no chance,” he said.
MARIA’S POWER
In the capital, San Juan, buildings shook and windows shattered from the force of the storm. Residents of some high-rise apartments sought refuge in bathrooms and firstfloor lobbies, but even those who sought out safe ground found themselves vulnerable.
Adriana Rosado and her husband decided to stay in the Ciqala Luxury Suites hotel in San Juan’s Miramar neighborhood because it had a generator and would be able to withstand power outages. It seemed like the safest, most comfortable option for their 2-month-old son to have access to electricity, air conditioning and water.
But Rosado, 21, hardly slept Tuesday night, with the howling winds banging against the building’s windows. At 4 a.m. Wednesday, Rosado woke to water flowing into the family’s sixthfloor hotel room. Shortly after the family left the hotel room, one of its windows was blown out by the storm.
“I just want it to be 10 p.m. so it can all pass and I can call my family,” said Rosado, sitting on the hallway carpet on the first floor with her baby, Jorge Nicolas, sleeping on a pillow and blanket beside her. Rosado’s neighborhood in Guaynabo, west of San Juan, experienced major flooding Wednesday. She had not heard from her mother since 4 a.m., unable to get cellphone service.
Macarena Gil Gandia, a resident of Hato Rey, a business district in San Juan, helped her mother clean out water that had started flooding the kitchen of her second-floor apartment at dawn Wednesday.
“There are sounds coming from all sides,” Gil Gandia said in a text message. “The building is moving! And we’re only on the second floor, imagine the rest!”
Parts of Hato Rey were underwater. An electric gate for her building in the neighborhood was blown off, Gil Gandia said.
In the lobby of Ciqala Luxury Suites in San Juan, Maria Gil de Lamadrid waited with her husband in the lobby as the rain and wind pounded on the hotel’s facade. The door of the hotel’s parking garage flopped violently in the wind. The sounds of the storm were so loud that it was hard for hotel guests to hear each other speak.
Gil de Lamadrid spent Tuesday night in the hotel after evacuating her nearby 16th-floor waterfront apartment, which has been prone to flooding during previous hurricanes. But even in a luxury hotel room, Gil de Lamadrid could not evade flooding; on Wednesday morning, inches of water began to seep into her hotel room through the balcony doors.
She did not yet know how her apartment building and neighbors were faring the storm. “I’m feeling anxious,” she said. But her husband shrugged.
“For me, it’s an adventure,” the husband said, “something to talk about later.”
Puerto Rico was spared the full force of the Category 5 Irma earlier this month. Irma sideswiped the territory Sept. 6, causing no deaths or widespread damage on the island but leaving more than 1 million people without electricity. More than 70,000 still had no power as Maria approached.
More than 11,000 people — and more than 580 pets — were in shelters, authorities said.