Maria’s waste a lingering concern
Puerto Rico struggles to export excess waste from hurricane
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO — Esteban Class, 58, tried his best in the year after Hurricane Maria not to be a burden to those around him.
When gas was scarce, he endured two-hour walks between his home in San Juan’s Villa Prades community, where he has lived for 50 years, and his job as a technician at a local television station. Sometimes still walking when night fell, he’d use his phone’s flashlight to replace the street lights that were out for months.
During the storm, his house was battered by sheets of tin roofing torn from other buildings. After Maria passed, he repurposed them to patch leaks in his own damaged roof.
And when trucks drove by picking up debris, he hesitated to flag them down, thinking the city workers had bigger problems.
“A thousand trucks drove by. But I wasn’t paying attention to any of that because there were people who were worse off than I was,” Class said.
But the trucks eventually stopped coming. The debris he collected on his property — broken doors, fallen trees, pieces of broken concrete and rebar — has been stacked up in front of his house for months.
A year after Maria, clearing the debris left behind is still a challenge on an island that relies on exporting this excess waste. Dumps have been overwhelmed, leaving some residents to rely on illegal dumpsites, which pose a public health threat.
“Hurricane Maria taught us the complexity of managing solid waste,” said Jessica Seiglie of Basura Cero, a community organization that seeks alternatives for managing waste. “There was too much ignorance among citizens about how to manage these materials because normally, we don’t generate them.”
In a letter to President Donald Trump last month, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló requested a funding extension from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for recovery efforts including trash removal, saying there was 4 million cubic yards worth of unprocessed debris on the island.
“Absent this support, the delays in the execution of emergency work will stall further the rebuilding process, affecting the more than 3 million U.S. citizens in the island,” Rosselló wrote. Pedro Cerame, spokesman for the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, said the island’s government had still not received response.
In some municipalities, the government deposited vegetative debris and other materials on the grounds of closed public schools. When images of schools being used as temporary dumps surfaced online, they stoked still-simmering outrage over the island government’s decision to close hundreds of schools.
By the time the Orlando Sentinel visited two of these schools in early September, the accumulated waste had been removed.
Seiglie argues that Puerto Rico’s garbage problems predated the storm but went unnoticed until trash began to stack up outside people’s homes after Maria — which happened, in part, because local governments were unprepared.
“There were municipalities that couldn’t open their landfills for weeks because they were flooded, and they had their own problems with debris that had to be removed,” she said.
The Puerto Rico Natural Resources Department secretary Tania Vázquez said the Environmental Protection Agency has been in charge of exporting debris from Maria that can’t be mixed in with regular trash in landfills. Trees, wood and other natural debris will be composted, she said.
Ferdinand Quiñones, an engineer who has studied water resources in Puerto Rico for decades, said that nets used to prevent waste buried in dumps from absorbing rainwater have a limited lifespan. Without regular maintenance, waste can seep into the land and flow into bodies of water.
“This is a legacy that we’re leaving for future generations … in 100 years or 75 years we have to start worrying about rehabilitating those sites,” he said.
Rather than burying trash, expanding dumps or exporting recyclables to countries that will buy and repurpose them, Sieglie thinks the local government should invest in handling more recyclables on the island and in industries that can support waste reduction.
“If we look at solid waste as natural resources that we’re wasting, but also financial resources that we’re wasting, we could … create the financial development we need so badly,” she said.
In the meantime, Class is waiting for help to arrive. He’s eager to take in his 52-year-old brother, who has multiple sclerosis and is at a nearby nursing home, but worries the rotting waste would make him sick. Then, there are the pests. “Mice don’t worry me as much because the cats are around. But if I go back there, I’ve even found snakes before,” Class said.
He called the municipality weeks ago, but no workers have come. The pile outside his house blocks the sidewalk, which Class worries is a hazard for the staff of the nearby nursing home and their elderly patients.
Trees and broken wood tangled and toppled by the hurricane remain in his yard where Maria deposited them. A year later, Class is still in a battle with nature.
At times it feels like a losing fight.
“I get so frustrated. I start here and by the time I get over there, weeds are already growing back,” he said. “I bought two trimmers and I only get halfway through and they break. They just explode.”