No relief
Puerto Rican coastal town still reeling.
YABUCOA, Puerto Rico – It has been nearly six months since Hurricane Maria roared ashore in this seaside community, considered ground zero for the storm. But in many corners of Yabucoa, it looks as if the storm hit just yesterday.
The baseball stadium, once the center of activity in this city of 37,000, sits abandoned, its overhead steel beams still mangled like twigs. Homes are missing walls and roofs, and about twothirds of the municipality is still without power. The mayor and other local officials work out of a private home because City Hall is battered and boarded up.
“The eye of Maria passed right over Yabucoa,” said Edgar Casanova, federal affairs director for Yabucoa. “Yet, this city has been ignored.”
Maria entered Puerto Rico here at dawn on Sept. 20 with sustained 155mph winds and continued across the island in its destructive, deadly march. The Category 4 storm killed more than
60 people, although some unofficial estimates have the death toll as high as
1,000, destroyed homes and knocked out power to most of the island.
Concrete homes that withstood previous hurricanes were pummeled, and City Hall was destroyed. After the storm, the hospital remained open using an old generator, but only from
7 a.m. to 7 p.m., because city officials feared the generator would break down.
One evening last year, a woman showed up after hours. She died of a heart attack in the parking lot while awaiting an ambulance from nearby Humacao, Casanova said.
FEMA has since shipped in more generators and the hospital resumed its
24-hour status, Casanova said. But local officials have had to supply 19 generators on their own to keep the local water plant running, he said.
The lack of state and federal attention in Yabucoa has been painful, he said: “Everyone’s suffering.”
Most painful has been the pace of power restoration. Irma Torres, 75, washes her clothes by hand and hangs them on a line outside her home on a cliff overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Maria tore off part of her roof and pushed the sea right up to her kitchen window.
FEMA awarded Torres $8,100 to replace furniture and other lost items. But the long, dark nights have been wearing on her, she said. At night, with a few solar-powered lamps throughout the home, she sits in the dark with her husband, Jose Morales, who is blind, and thinks about the sea.
“I’m not well. I’m nervous,” Torres said. “I don’t sleep at night. I think too much. I’m scared that something else happens we don’t expect and I end up drowned at sea.”
Despite nearly 4,000 utility workers across the island working to repair the grid, remote areas like Yabucoa remain a challenge, said Col. Jason Kirk, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Task Force power restoration commander.
“This is of a magnitude beyond anything that’s been undertaken in the United States,” he said.
Up the mountain from Torres, Rafael Martinez, 59, spends long, dark nights in his brother’s storm-battered home. The storm peeled back a chunk of the home’s concrete-and-rebarreinforced garage roof and punched holes in the roof.
Water streams in during heavy rains, and Martinez is constantly pushing water out of the home with a mop. He eats meals at the home of a relative, who has a gas stove, then returns at dusk to listen to the radio and fall asleep soon after nightfall.
The family has been denied federal assistance because they’re struggling to prove ownership of the home, an inheritance from their dad.
Martinez said he occasionally sees crews and bucket trucks working on power lines at the base of the mountain but realizes it’ll be a while before they make their way up to him.
“Six months is a long time,” he said. “And who knows how much longer still.”