Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
In Puerto Rico, a confluence of calamity
Much to blame for slow storm recovery
MAUNABO, Puerto Rico — Before Hurricane Maria tore through the rest of this island, it came to Mayor Jorge Márquez’s home.
The storm ripped through improvised plastic shutters, shook the windows and sent his panicked family, including his grandchildren, scurrying to a bathroom to hide.
At the end, when the winds finally died down, he stepped outside to glimpse the damage to the town he’s run for nearly two decades. Márquez wept. The easy part of the storm was over. The real agony had yet to begin.
“Everything we’ve built over 16 years destroyed in a single day,” he said, pausing to fight back tears.
A month has passed since Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, and the island continues to operate in emergency mode, struggling to do even the basics: save lives, protect property, provide drinking water, turn on the lights. Time ticks away in a hazy state of permanent disaster, a catastrophe born from the worst storm to cross Puerto Rico in 85 years — and of a slow recovery by the federal, state and local governments.
The blame for the unsatisfactory response, the Miami Herald and Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism found, lies with bureaucracies that were unprepared for a collapsed commu-
nications system and overwhelmed by the logistical challenges of aiding an island left with no corner unharmed. Even the White House appeared indifferent to the needs of 3.4 million American citizens 1,000 miles from its shores.
Above all, strapped finances that plunged the island into an economic tailspin long before any winds arrived left the state government so thinly stretched it could not maintain its power grid or afford extensive preparations for a monster storm — much less pay for the sort of recovery that would be demanded in the mainland U.S.
Forty-eight people died, though that’s likely a significant undercount.
Much remains to be learned about the recovery flaws Maria exposed. But disaster managers already know the historic storm — which has required more FEMA food and water distribution than any other disaster — will force them to rethink how they approach a worst-case scenario that ordinary plans were illequipped to deal with in the systemic breakdown that followed landfall.
“If this response had been perfect, you still would have very significant suffering and destruction, no matter what, because of the storm,” said U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who pushed early on for more military involvement. “But I do think some days were lost.”
Left in the dark
The urgent call to Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, whose cellphone signal had vanished, came a few hours after the strongest Maria winds had passed on Sept. 20. Carlos Mercader, executive director of Puerto Rico’s federal office in Washington, got through to a working landline at the governor’s mansion in Old San Juan.
Mercader had news for the governor, obtained from a friend’s WhatsApp message: Waters were rising fast in Levittown, a suburb west of San Juan, and people were scrambling to their roofs. The governor’s press secretary checked social media and saw a local news reporter had just posted a similar message about the flooding, about a dozen miles away.
Out rushed the governor with rescue crews, including power line workers with bucket trucks.
“We were there until early morning,” Rosselló told the Herald and the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, for its initials in Spanish) in an interview, recalling the first in a string of calamities that started to pile up: a rupture at the Guajataca Dam. A power blackout across 70 percent of the island’s 69 hospitals. A fuel shortage. A shutdown of airports and seaports for three days.
“This is a fluid situation that, if left unattended, could get worse,” the 38-year-old governor, who took office in January, said after nearly four weeks of living in extended crisis.
Rosselló’s public safety chief, Héctor Pesquera, had been unable to drive out of his house after the storm because his street was littered with trees. Pesquera, a former head of Miami’s FBI office, said he grabbed his briefcase and set out on foot with a flashlight in his mouth, dodging hanging branches.
The emergency operations center in Caguas, south of San Juan, had flooded and become unusable, Pesquera said. He reached a cop by phone who could give him a lift to San Juan’s convention center, which instantly became the government’s command headquarters. The drive to the convention center, usually 10 minutes long, took an hour.
Ricardo Ramos, chief executive of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, PREPA, watched from the public utility’s headquarters as Maria’s onslaught knocked out the island’s power grid. Then, the storm took out the utility’s computer servers, leaving the man in charge of keeping on the lights entirely in the dark.
The local Federal Emergency Management Administration chief, Alejandro De La Campa, had bedded down — along with some 300 FEMA workers still responding to Hurricane Irma — at a Caguas warehouse. It was restocked with the standard number of provisions FEMA stored ahead of any storm, no matter its size: about 700,000 liters of water and half a million meals.
They proved to be woefully insufficient: The supplies ran out in two days.
The only reason Hurricane Irma two weeks earlier hadn’t depleted the stores, he added, was because that storm skirted Puerto Rico and mostly hurt the island’s northern coast — meaning southern municipalities could aid their neighbors without tapping all the federal provisions.
‘Call me paranoid’
Puerto Rico opened 500 emergency shelters ahead of Maria, a record number that didn’t draw many evacuees until the rains actually started and people seemed to accept that the storm might really be as bad as forecast. Afterward, evacuees kept seeking shelter; at their peak, the number reached 15,000.
“They might call me paranoid,” Rosselló said. “I anticipated this could happen, and seven days before the storm, we started working on it.”
But he was still hamstrung by Puerto Rico’s measly coffers: Expenses incurred before the White House approved a Sept. 20 major disaster declaration had to be paid in full by the state, which is $72 billion in debt and under the control of a federally appointed fiscal board.
So asking other states for help before Maria, which might have lined up resources for Puerto Rico more quickly, would have been an expensive undertaking without knowing for sure what havoc the storm would wreak.
In contrast, six days before Irma hit Florida, the state filed its first request through the Emergency Mutual Aid Compact available to states and territories. Florida ultimately made 99 requests before landfall.
The number of requests Puerto Rico made before Maria: Zero.
PREPA, the bankrupt power utility, which is $9 billion in debt and locked in a court battle with its bondholders, could also have requested aid after Maria hit through the American Public Power Association, a mutual aid trade network for some 1,100 electrical utilities, as Texas and Florida did after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. That’s partly how, 10 days after Irma, Florida utilities restored power to 98 percent of the 6.7 million customers who had gone dark.
But PREPA didn’t tap the aid network.
Instead, Ramos chose to hire one of two companies that had answered PREPA’s request for proposals for far less restoration work after Irma, but had not yet been hired: Whitefish Energy Holdings, a small, littleknown Montana firm formed only two years ago.
The New York Power Authority did send crews the day after the storm after Puerto Rico asked New York directly for help. Whitefish later contracted with Jacksonville’s JEA public utility and the Kissimmee Utility Authority to provide additional line workers.
PREPA also hired 60 local contractors, Ramos said, but still didn’t have enough line workers or utility trucks — and couldn’t immediately welcome more, either: The government had no gas for trucks and no food or housing for crews.
That Puerto Rico’s power grid was in precarious shape was well known. Seventy percent of PREPA customers lost power during Irma, though nearly 97 percent had been restored by the time Maria arrived two weeks later. But the newest equipment in the system is from the 1970s, Ramos said, with much of it dating back to the 1950s and ’60s, though its useful life is supposed to be 30 years. Over the last three years, the utility has lost more than two-thirds of its workers — about 2,500 people, Ramos said — as public austerity measures forced PREPA to slash benefits.
A crippled National Guard
The most immediate military response came from the Puerto Rican National Guard, which activated its 8,000 available members. But only 4,500 could report to duty.
More than a thousand work as civilian first responders and weren’t called up. About 1,000 more had already moved to the mainland, fleeing the island’s high unemployment rate. Others lost property in the storm or couldn’t reach their bases, and stayed home until they secured supplies for their families and the roads were cleared, said Rivera, the National Guard commander.
“Maria treated us all the same,” he said.