To get electricity, locals turn to DIY
It took only minutes for Hurricane Maria to kill power to the town of Coamo, cracking wooden poles, snapping power lines and hurling transformers to the ground.
For months, residents begged Puerto Rico’s power company and the Army Corps of Engineers to bring back their electricity, with few results.
So the people of this town of 40,000 high in the mountains of southern Puerto Rico have started restoring power on their own, pulling power lines from undergrowth and digging holes for wooden posts in a do-it-yourself effort to solve a small part of the United States’ longest-running power outage.
“If we don’t do this, we’ll be without power until summer,” said Vice Mayor Edgardo Vazquez, who is using hand-drawn maps to organize a brigade that includes teachers, handymen, a postal worker and an accountant, backed by municipal workers with professional equipment, tools and experience in light electrical work.
Puerto Rico’s power company and the Corps of Engineers have thousands of workers and managers from mainland public utilities and private companies working across the island to restore power. The federally funded multibillion-dollar effort has been slowed by rough terrain, slow arrival of supplies and delays in asking for help from power companies on the U.S. mainland after the Sept. 20 Category 4 storm. More than 400,000 power customers across Puerto Rico remain in the dark.
In Coamo, frustrated by months of heat and darkness, 60-year-old homemaker Carmita Rivera called a meeting at her home in mid-January to try to find local solutions to the problem.
“Desperation set in,” Rivera said. “We all felt like: ‘What about us? We’re human beings. Enough is enough.’“
Fifty people showed up and swiftly went to work. In late January, a group of neighbors laid a 300-pound wooden electric post atop two logs and tipped it into a freshly dug 5-foot hole.
They hooted as one man hit his pickup’s accelerator and dragged the pole alongside the hole. The group then used a neighbor’s tow truck to guide the 35-foot pole into the hole.
In the western mountain town of San Sebastian, a group of municipal workers, retired company workers and volunteers have restored power to nearly 2,000 homes.