‘They have forgotten about us’
Locals endure days filled with distress as hope wavers amid sluggish recovery effort
The sun rose Wednesday morning in the low mountains of north-central Puerto Rico, near the town of Corozal, to reveal the world that Hurricane Maria has made: shattered trees, traffic lights dangling precipitously from broken poles and, here on the face of a weedy hill, a gushing spring, one of the few places where people from miles around could find fresh water.
At 6 a.m., about a dozen trucks and little cars had parked nearby. People brought rain barrels, buckets, orange juice bottles.
Some men clambered up the steep face of the hill, placing plastic pipes or old pieces of gutter underneath the running spring, directing the water into plastic tanks, then hauling them away. Others crouched at a spot where the water trickled down to the pavement. Jorge Díaz Rivera, 61, was there with 11 Clorox bottles. He lives in a community a few minutes’ drive away where there is no water, no food and no help. The National Guard helicopters have been passing overhead, and sometimes he and his neighbors yell at them, pleading for water. But so far he has seen no help.
“They have forgotten about us,” he said.
Puerto Rico has not been forgotten, but more than a week after Hurricane Maria hit, it’s a woozy empire of wreckage; of waiting in line for food, water and gas and then finding another line to wait in some more. A team of New York Times reporters and photographers spent 24 hours — from dawn Wednesday to scorching afternoon heat, to a long uneasy night and Thursday morning without power — with people trying to survive the catastrophe that Hurricane Maria left behind.
9:05 a.m. Ocean Park, San Juan
Joey Ramos descended the stairs of his two-story home in water boots and swimming trunks. He carried a green electric saw and waded across the black waters that had flooded Calle Santa Cecilia.
Ever since Hurricane Maria flooded the first floor of his house in Ocean Park, Ramos has been boxed in the second floor of his home, hunkered down with his wife and his four pit bull-mastiff-mix dogs, which guard his house.
The waters stink of excrement. He’s seen fish swim by his stoop. To exit his home he often paddles an abandoned refrigerator like a gondola.
He stays to protect his home from looters after he saw the bakery across his street being ransacked. “The hurricane wasn’t even over and we saw some guys break in and take out televisions,” Ramos said. “They even waved and smiled at me.”
11:57 a.m. Santurce, San Juan
The storm for many was not just something to be endured. It was also a message that it was time to leave Puerto Rico.
In front of the pink and green, art deco facade of the Telégrafo building in Santurce, dozens of people checked their phones. The section of the street is one of the few spots on the island where residents can connect to free Wi-Fi.
People try to reach family members abroad or those left isolated in island towns. Many check their emails for any word from their employer. It’s common to see people break down after making contact with a loved one for the first time since the hurricane.
And for Raymond Hernández, the strip of sidewalk was a way to book his ticket out of Puerto Rico. “I’m going to Tampa to find work for a couple of months,” Hernández, a personal trainer, said. “And who knows if I end up staying over there.”
12:50 p.m. Arecibo
On another very bad day, one good thing happened to Olga Cervantes, 75, a retired government worker. She had waited four hours for gas, starting at 4 a.m. Then she waited in line at the bank for four more hours for cash — but the computer system failed, and she went away empty-handed.
“Look at that — you have money, but you don’t have money,” she said. “Emotionally, it’s terrible.”
And then she found a man selling cold juice and milk out of the back of a refrigerated truck and came away with two half-gallons of grape juice and orange juice. It was refreshingly cold in her hands. She brought the juice home to a hot, dark house, where there was little to do but wait to fall asleep.
5:26 p.m. Utuado
A woman washed her daughter’s hair in a roadside waterfall in Utuado, a city of brightly painted concrete homes nestled in a sleepy valley. The streets were caked with mud, many of the acacias were bent and broken, and in the city and the surrounding municipality, also called Utuado, an unknown number of its approximately 35,000 residents were cut off from the rest of the world by mudslides or failed infrastructure, said Francisco Rullan, executive director of the governor’s energy policy office.
5:54 p.m. Salinas
A tree landed on the hearse, water rushed into the funeral home and the sweating mourners were being devoured by mosquitoes, but Salinas Memorial Funeral Home was finally open for business.
A generator roared in the background. It powered the two fans beside Josue Santos’ coffin as extension cords dangling from the sagging ceiling brought in extra light. The funeral director, José Manuel Rodríguez, wore jeans because the wind busted the windows and the rain drenched all his suits.
“That was the embalming room,” he said, pointing toward a mess of broken wood.
Rodríguez was happy for the business. His eyes welled up with tears as he recalled how, out of cash and food, he had resorted to killing a fighting cock worth $200 to feed his four children.
“I went to three different funeral homes, and all of them were destroyed,” said the dead man’s mother, Aileen Ayala. “I got to this one, and the funeral director was hosing it down and pulling wet furniture out to the street. He said, ‘You see how we are, but I’ll do it.’ He received us in his office by candlelight.”
Santos, 29, died of a heart condition the morning the hurricane struck. Because virtually all communications were down, his family had only been able to inform the few friends and family they had run into on the street.
“We went through that personal torment alone,” Ayala, 53, said, noting that the sparsely attended wake would have been packed had everyone, particularly her son’s colleagues at Wal-Mart, gotten the news.
“Then you go out and stand in line — because now life here is all about lines — a line for gas, a line for the bank, and everyone starts talking: ‘I lost this, I lost that, I lost my roof! I lost my car.’ ” Ayala said. “And when it’s my turn, I have to say: ‘I lost my son.’ ”
11:40 p.m. San Juan
The hotels in the capital are filling up with government workers and contractors. At the Verdanza Hotel late Wednesday, a small group of FEMA-contracted emergency medical evacuation specialists — registered nurses, therapists and jet pilots — were hanging out, waiting for their morning assignment.
The bar was mostly empty, but it was blaring dance music. The assignment was delivered by a bald and burly man who appeared at their table and told them to be at the airport at 0800 hours. They were going to fly eight dialysis patients from San Juan to the island of St. Croix, he said, where they would be transferred to the mainland by the military.
All of the specialists seated around the table work for companies that do not allow them to give their names. “You drop off Tom Cruise in Paris, you don’t feel like you’ve accomplished much,” one of the pilots said. But this was different.