Puerto Rico police park themselves in car shop

If the people of the Puerto Rican city of Caguas need to find the police in coming weeks and maybe months, they will have to go to a car repair garage.

The police station where dozens of officers worked before the building was wrecked by Hurricane Maria on September 20 has been moved into a makeshift, open-air office in the area where mechanics used to fix police cruisers.

The station in the San Juan suburb is one of hundreds of critical structures being evaluated by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and local authorities to get the devastated US territory of 3.4 million people back on its feet.

The roads around the station are littered with telephone poles snapped like breadsticks by Maria, the worst storm to hit Puerto Rico in 90 years.

Much work remains

The shell that was once this bustling community’s police station provides a glimpse of the challenges facing islanders who can hardly fathom the mammoth rebuilding job ahead of them, with electricity and other basic services not likely to be restored for weeks.

Next to the now dormant car lifts once used to get mechanics under police cruisers for repair, officers in Caguas’ tiny new station have put a desk and office chairs on the concrete floor, with the emblem of the island’s national police force placed on the office’s one full-length wall.

“It’s what we have left,” says the officer manning the station while other members of the department are out directing traffic at intersections in town that, as in the rest of the island, have no stoplights due to lack of electricity.