Barranquitas, Puerto Rico, rebuilt — but it isn’t ready for another Maria
Barranquitas, a rural region of 30,000 people in central Puerto Rico, gets its name from the terrain. Barranca roughly translates to ravine or gully, and the steep slopes here meant the area was especially hard-hit by Hurricane Maria.
Countless landslides blocked roads for weeks. Streets weren’t completely cleared of mud and debris until long after green returned to the lush valleys, three months after the hurricane.
“This area was full of mud and trees,” Barranquitas resident Israel Matos told The World as he pointed to a busy intersection at the bottom of a hill a few miles from his house.
“It was above that,” he said pointing to a tall tree, “about 10 feet.”
Impassable roads here and across Puerto Rico exacerbated other problems. FEMA didn’t reach Barranquitas with the first emergency water supplies until two weeks after the storm and utility crews couldn’t get here, either.
“The power company was telling the mayor, ‘We cannot get to Barranquitas because the roads are blocked. The big trucks cannot get through,’” Mr. Matos said.
Mr. Matos didn’t get power back until February, and that’s only because he and nearly 20 neighbors hired a private crew to restring roughly two miles of power lines and prop up utility poles.
“We had to do it ourselves,” he said. “We cannot wait for the government.”
When the power went out, so did water for Mr. Matos and his neighbors. They live on hills overlooking the surrounding valleys and water has to be pumped up to their homes from the water treatment facility that’s downhill and miles away.
Mr. Matos has a 6,000-gallon underground cistern in his front yard to guard against frequent water outages. But after Maria, even that wasn’t enough.
“By mid-November, it was so low that I decided to carry water from an aqueduct,” Mr. Matos said.
The fact that Israel Matos’ personal preparations weren’t enough for this storm is a testament to the enormous infrastructure damage it caused. As former head of the National Weather Service’s Puerto Rico office, Mr. Matos likely was one of the island’s most prepared citizens ahead of Hurricane Maria. His job used to be to stand behind a podium before big storms and urge the public to prepare.
“From my point of view as [a] meteorologist, I knew that a storm with that intensity will [wreak] havoc on the island,” Mr. Matos said. “And I expected that. But what I didn’t expect was that the response was so late. It was very frustrating.”
As frustrated as Mr. Matos was, he was still one of the lucky ones. His house was damaged, but not badly. Just down the hill, one of his neighbor’s homes was destroyed.
Migdalia Rosado Sánchez has pictures of her old house with just a single wall standing after Maria. Her tin roof was blown off the house and the metal sheets slid underneath her nearby car.
“It was like they placed a bomb inside … I lost everything that I had,” Ms. Sánchez said. “I spent months not accepting it. It was horrible.”
A year after Maria, the town is in some ways no better equipped to handle a big storm than it was a year ago.
The power grid is still a fragile patchwork of temporary fixes like the ones Matos and his neighbors arranged. The Puerto Rican power authority itself admits the island’s electricity infrastructure is weak, and has no timeframe laid out for work to strengthen the grid against future storms.
Water also remains an issue. Most of the stations that pump water up the mountains of Barranquitas don’t have generators, so when the power goes, so does the water for at least a third of the town’s 30,000 residents.