Luis Rodriguez- Cruz moved to Vermont for a PhD program. Less than a month before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, he moved to his new home. He wondered how it would affect his hometown of JuanaDiaz.
She heard that the river behind his grandmother's house had grown. The river was swollen by the rain from Maria. Rodriguez- Cruz was desperate for information about his family and community back home.
In class, we had a discussion about a paper, and I was the one to talk about it. He told Earther that he had all of the thoughts. I broke when I couldn't speak. There was a combination of sadness, worry, and guilt in that class.
Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September of last year. After the rain and gusts knocked out the power grid, it became the longest ever in the U.S. It was the first category 4 storm to hit Puerto Rico since the 1930s, and it happened during one of the U.S.'s most expensive hurricanes. Bridges collapsed and roads were destroyed as a result of the storms. Some communities didn't have access to water. There wasn't a lot of communication to the outside while this was happening.
Five years have passed since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, and the island is still feeling the effects of another storm. By the time the storm hit Puerto Rico, it had become a category 1 Hurricane. The island was without power because of the broken grid. More than one million households in Puerto Rico were without electricity as of Monday afternoon. Two people have died and hundreds of people were evacuated from the hardest hit areas. There are images online of the destruction caused by the floods.
There is flash flooding in the area. The current situation will only get worse with heavy rain. The San Juan NWS urged people to move to higher ground immediately.
Several people in Puerto Rico told me that the island had not recovered from Maria. The cost of living has gone up as living conditions for the average person have become difficult. LUMA took over Puerto Rico's electricity distribution last year. After several hurricanes and earthquakes, the company promised to fix the broken system, but residents have seen more frequent and expensive power cuts.
Many Puerto Ricans have been displaced due to the economic and infrastructural issues. The island's population declined over the course of a year. It was the biggest year-to-year decline since 1950. After the storm, gentrification has gone up. Puerto Ricans have been displaced from their homes and beaches due to the influx of wealthy Americans.
The issues on the island are a sign of life before and after the storm. Things have only gotten worse. Most of the Puerto Ricans interviewed by Earther were in Puerto Rico after the storm. Interviews have been translated into English.
A friend from Rodriguez- Cruz's hometown called him the week before Hurricane Maria was to hit. Halfway through the conversation, the call stopped. The calls wouldn't go through when Rodriguez- Cruz tried to call his friend again. After a relative found a highway with cell phone service, he was able to talk to his family and friends.
After two weeks, I got a call from my mom. She was back to work at the bakery and they had a landline. She called me, but none of them told me about the roof on my grandma’s house. That’s where I was raised. Everything was lost. The roof was blown away… All of them lost everything.
He was helping his family in Vermont when he moved there. Rodriguez-Cruz had access to the internet, but his family didn't. Older Puerto Ricans don't have property titles for their homes. People informally built homes over land set aside for agriculture. It was difficult for people across the island to claim support from FEMA because of the different housing laws.
I remember struggling to communicate with my mom and saying ‘they’re asking for this information’... filing the application was kind of hard. FEMA sends you emails and stuff, so I had to be aware because my mom, my grandma, none of them have emails. It’s like, how do you have a recovery process in a catastrophe like this one? New Orleans [during Hurricane Katrina] wasn’t exactly the same [situation], but shouldn’t that have informed these agencies how to navigate these disruptions and processes? How do you ask people to file everything over the phone, or with the internet when there’s no phone [service]?
Rodriguez- Cruz's grandmother was not able to return to her home until early next year.
When she saw that Hurricane Maria was going to hit Puerto Rico, she put most of her possessions in one room of her apartment. She decided to stay at her parents' house and said that the next few days were chaotic. She and her family had to wait in line for a long time. It took more than three hours to get to places that were only a short drive away. She spent the worst part of the storm bailing water out of her parents house and trying to stop more water from coming in. She had to stay in the bathroom with her parents until the rain stopped.
She found a lot of damaged windows when she came back to check on her apartment. Some of her neighbors took refuge in the stairs. The opportunity to leave and support her patients from the outside came about a few weeks after the storm.
We needed to help get medication into the island. We realized that if everyone stays here [in Puerto Rico], there’s no communication. So I spoke with the Rheumatology Association. They said, ‘If you’re able to go out, we can help you bring in medication.’.. It was just a horrible feeling. And it was a relief on one hand, that I’d be able to sleep and get food for my parents.
He works with rheumatology patients again. She changed some of her office's operations after learning from Maria. She worried about supporting her patients because of the frequent power failures.
I have a different office now. We have a planta (generator). Now I say [to my patients], ‘I have a planta, bring me your medication, you can leave it here. If you want, get some food and we’ll leave it here. And you can come every day if you want just to take your medication.’ I have patients that come and take their medications because they don’t have electricity at their house. More people have generators now, but it’s expensive. You have to buy gasoline… if someone has chronic issues, if you’re diabetic and don’t have a generator for your insulin, you’re not going to make it.
The executive director of Impacto Juventud is a psychology professor at U PR Mayagez and a therapist in San Germn. He has seen trauma in many Puerto Ricans. In Spanish, he said that he was still affected by his own experiences during Maria.
He was in San Germn with his partner and daughter when a window broke. He kept a close eye on his home and cleaned up the water. He had to wait in line for hours for cash at the bank. He doesn't believe that the Puerto Rican government and the U.S. government have done enough to prepare for climate change. He thinks that the lack of support will widen income inequality and displacement.
It was devastating. I think we’re all still living through it. There was no communication, it felt like there was no government… I had to stand in long lines with my daughter to get ahold of supplies and services. At that time, in 2017, she was only two years old. She had to sit for a while on the floor. It was painful to see that. I’m talking to you right now, and I’m choking up… Another difficult thing is, I have two kids in Caguas. After a week and a half, we could finally get in a car and try to drive there to check on them. When we made it to Cayey, we saw how destroyed the mountains were. Without trees, and all yellow. It’s like someone threw acid on the mountains there. Everyone in the car either fell silent or began to cry. It was like a symbol of destruction. Not just the infrastructural destruction, but the ecological destruction, too.
The effects of the storm on teens and children have been seen by Lugo. He said that the outreach came from a class he was in. He told students to work on a project that would benefit their communities. Students said they wanted to keep working on mental health issues in Puerto Rico after the project was a success.
I always say that Impacto Juventud is Maria’s child. It’s a child born from struggle. It was also born from the tenacity and motivation from the students… We give educational resources to different communities, and we also support their mental health. This is important; they’re not just affected by the hurricane, but everything that’s come afterwards, too. We had [Hurricane] Irma before Maria, and then we had the earthquakes. And then we had the pandemic… This one girl in the program, any time it rained and she was in the program with us, she’d become really nervous. She’d keep asking about going home. It was raining really hard one day, and she started crying. Her family lost their roof during the hurricane.
Kenira Thompson is the vice president of research at the Ponce Health Sciences University in Ponce. They were going to try to reach patients from September to December in order to make sure they had access to the services they needed. People in the remote areas didn't know how to access aid when they arrived. Thompson helped create a clinic to help Puerto Ricans. Direct Relief and the Heart to Heart Foundation have supported it.
In some of the most remote places in Puerto Rico, [situations] that you wouldn’t even fathom. Families living even before the hurricane in very dire conditions. No steady running water. And a family of like 14 living in a very small house with techos de zinc (zinc roof). Post December 2017, we’ve established a health clinic that we’ve continued to promote. It’s a free clinic.
Thompson and other people from the university tried to get things done. They used a satellite phone to call people in the U.S. once they realized the airport in Ponce was clear of debris. They worked to get medically fragile people off the island and into the mainland U.S.
EartherEnvironmental Justice[We were] clearing patients, making sure they were okay to fly. It was so sad. These were mainly commercial flights that don’t have capacity to handle people that are connected [to medical devices]. So we had to coordinate additional support planes… for patients that could sit on a flight for a couple of hours. And even then, it was hundreds of people arriving with their loved ones hooked up to a portable ventilator. Just begging for someone to take them. It was horrific.
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