Heavy rains cause catastrophic damage in a country that was beginning to recover from the ravages caused by ‘Maria’ five years ago
Anyone who has experienced traumatic loss knows the wrenching effect of anniversaries. On Sunday, two days before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 and caused the death of three thousand people, nature sent another atmospheric phenomenon that has been primed with memory. “It is enough to see the faces of the people in the areas most affected by ‘María’ when we order them to evacuate,” said the head of the National Guard, José Juan Reyes.
A priori, hurricane ‘Fiona’ seemed more manageable than the ghost of ‘Maria’, as it was a category 1 cyclone, but it was accompanied by torrential rains that in just three hours accumulated more water than all the city had seen together of Ponce in its history. But it did not stop there. The sky continued to discharge all day and all night as if it were the universal deluge. And at dawn, the rainfall continued, with no signs of abating.
“This is not over,” Ernesto Morales, head of the National Meteorological Service, warned at a press conference. “More rains are expected to affect the island, therefore this is serious, gentlemen, it will not stop at least until Wednesday.” And on top of that, it was raining on wet, literally. “Our soils were already saturated,” lamented the governor, Pedro Pierluisi, who is making his debut in the disaster task. “The storm is much better organized than we anticipated,” he said, to the perplexity of many.
It wasn’t just the storm. Five years after ‘María’, “a historical event concentrated in the La Plata basin,” Morales recalled, Puerto Rico was barely raising its head. The floods have washed away everything they found and have turned the rubble into ammunition from the waters to bring down the little rebuilt infrastructure. This is how the river knocked down the brand new Utuado bridge, designed to last 75 years, despite being considered a provisional structure. The permanent works would have begun in 2024.
Before nightfall, the electrical infrastructure gave way and left 1.3 million people, almost half the population, in the dark. Emergency teams couldn’t even fly over the network to assess the damage. By the time the governor and his team updated the data yesterday morning, only 30% of the population had electricity.
lessons from the past
For many, the situation was much more disastrous than what they experienced with ‘Maria’, because then the damage was more concentrated, “but it served as a lesson for the response team,” said the governor. From this came a regulation that has forced all hospitals to have their generators ready. The duty pharmacies continue to operate and even dispense medicine without a medical signature in the 128 shelters where thousands of people and hundreds of pets were crowded, thanks to the Good Samaritan Law, which was activated automatically “so that there is no reluctance to attend the people,” encouraged the governor. “90% of patients have their medications, we don’t need more,” the secretary of health announced proudly, although that figure leaves out 10% of patients.
There are also four warehouses with seven million food items and four million liters of water, immediately available when a disaster is declared. Five years ago the island only had one. The same one that Donald Trump reluctantly visited in October 2017, almost two weeks after the hurricane devastated the island. This Monday the governor said he had immediately received numerous messages on his cell phone from the highest officials of the Washington government and some states such as New York and New Jersey. New York Governor Kathy Hochul immediately dispatched a hundred Spanish-speaking rescuers to assist the former Spanish colony that has never been fully assimilated by the US empire after the 1898 defeat.
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