Town keeps lights on throughout Fiona
Five years ago today, Hurricane Maria made a direct hit on Puerto Rico, ravaging the entire island and obliterating our outdated power grid. Most of the resulting 3,000-some deaths weren’t due to the direct impacts of the storm. Rather, they were caused by the prolonged power outages and the delayed and meager response from the local and federal government.
I write this now in Adjuntas, a rural town far inland in the mountains, where we are now waiting for the rain to stop falling from another major hurricane. Hurricane Fiona has left our electrical grid faltering all over the island, bringing with it familiar feelings of PTSD.
After Maria in 2017, it took four months for the power to come back on in downtown Adjuntas. Some of the poor, rural communities far from the urban center were without electricity for two years.
But at the headquarters of Casa Pueblo, the organization my parents founded 42 years ago, we were able to turn the lights on almost right away. And just as we did five years ago, we’ve kept our lights on throughout the wrath of Fiona.
Originally founded to prevent mining in the area, our organization adopted solar power in 1999 as a means to protect biodiversity. The fossil fuel dependency of Puerto Rico was, and remains, the biggest threat to our health, wildlife and natural resources. Our group has long focused on breaking the model of dependency — on our government and on the United States, of which we remain essentially a colony with little representation — and instead engage in community actions.
After Maria, we were one of the few places in the entire country able to reopen right away. The government was incapable of reaching communities in remote locations, but we had our radio station getting out lifesaving information and directing people to services.
Casa Pueblo became an energy oasis. People came to plug in their equipment and recharge their cell phones. We started helping people with water, communications, health, cleaning and providing tarps and equipment gathered in part from the diaspora, including from families in Houston who were only just picking up the pieces from Hurricane Harvey.
Dr. María Eugenia Cabanillas-Narvaez from the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Hospital and her sister Maria Antonia were among the saints who were integral in coordinating the evacuation of the most urgently sick or injured from Puerto Rico on private flights. Those planes flew in critical supplies including 14,000 solar lamps which we distributed, teaching people how to harness the sun to light their homes.
Since Hurricane Maria, we have continued to transform the energy landscape of Adjuntas. We have installed solar panels at over 130 homes of low-income families and people with chronic diseases who need power for things like respirators.
Just yesterday, a neighbor told us that thanks to the solar arrays installed, his daughter’s dialysis machine was able to keep functioning during these past few days of Fiona. We have powered grocery stores for food security and other critical infrastructure like the fire station, the elderly home and the elementary school. We’ve installed solar panels for the barbershop, la lechonera, restaurants, warehouses, the bakery and the pharmacy.
Right now, with backing by the Honnold Foundation, we’re at the point of completing a microgrid in downtown Adjuntas with a one-megawatt battery for energy storage. Businesses will be interconnected through this microgrid, paying for the energy at a fixed rate, with 50 percent going to a social investment fund to help low-income families achieve energy security.
Five years after Maria, we are better prepared for disaster like the one we now face today. This was not something that happened from the top down. It was pushed by people who are at the front line of the transition. We call it an “Energy Insurrection.”
And people in power are starting to take notice. Local governments from other municipalities are coming to learn from what Adjuntas has done. The U.S. Department of Energy has recognized Adjuntas as one of 10 study sites to understand and develop better technology for microgrid interactions.
We know Texas faces its own energy instability, and some communities in Houston still haven’t fully recovered from Harvey or the devastation of Winter Storm Uri. We are forever grateful to our friends in Houston and throughout the diaspora for coming to aid Puerto Rico during our crisis. Now we hope to be a model for other communities of what can be achieved by bucking dependency — on fossil fuels, on a government that offers us little representation and on the status quo — and building resilience through our own clean and democratic power system.