Puerto Rico

Damage in the wake of Maria

Even as I post pictures of the damage Hurricane Maria has left in Puerto Rico, I can’t imagine what conditions must be like.  I can only go by what I have personally experienced. 

I was in Honduras about a year after Hurricane Mitch.  Mitch was a Category 5 hurricane with 180 mph winds.  I had assumed that those winds devastated Honduras, but I was apparently wrong.  The winds hit only an island offshore.  By the time Mitch landed, it had downgraded to a tropical storm.  The rain, not the wind, was what caused the damage.  By all accounts it was horrific, flooding everywhere, mudslide on the mountains, buildings shoulder deep in mud and so forth.  But there was no sign of it by the time I got there.  There were markings of how high the mud got, but it was all cleared off.  The bananas that had drowned were all replanted.  The buildings were still standing.  People had horror stories to tell, and there were many subtle signs that below the surface all was not well, but no signs to the casual observer that anything had happened.  Only the coconut trees were dying, of some disease spread by the hurricane.

More damage

I was in New Orleans about six months after Katrina, and it was obvious to even the most casual observer that there was a problem.  The airport looked normal enough, and so did the French Quarter and certain shopping malls.  There were places where the levies had breached on one side of the river but not the other.  On one side the lights would be on and all would be functioning; on the other all ruin.  Again, the damage was not the wind, but the flooding.  There were areas along the waterways and further down the river where everything was wiped out.  Houses in the Ninth Ward had obvious structural damage and were not salvageable. 

But where I was working the houses were still standing, soaked, but structures intact.  The people were (mostly) evacuated and the houses (mostly) empty.  But they were standing.  They looked OK from the outside.  Once we got in, they were soaked and dried out.   Items in closets, linen cupboards and the like were not dried out and stank.  Kitchens had water pooling in pots and pans and were growing black mold that smelled of sulfur.  They reeked of rotting food.  Drywall that had been soaked and dried was easy to pull off.  Throwing away the belongings gave a painfully intimate view of people’s private lives.  Occasionally a synthetic stuffed animal or oil painting survived surprisingly well.  But for the most part only the china was salvageable.  There was no electricity or running water.   When we worked in a neighborhood, FEMA management would leave a Port-a-Potty somewhere on the block.   

The trash service picking up all the debris we removed from the houses had run out its contract just before we arrived.  Huge piles of trash built up alongside the houses.  The owners who came back were not in their houses anymore, but in FEMA trailers parked in the driveway.  I can only assume the used batteries and tank water.  Their refrigerators were too small to hold any extended supply of food.  This meant having to shop every day, when the nearest grocery store might be miles and miles away, so many people ate in cafeterias set up by local churches and disaster relief agencies.  There was no running water, so people picked up bottled water daily from FEMA.

In commercial districts, stores were boarded up for block after block.  Churches were open, serving as relief centers.  I also saw a veterinary clinic that was open.   Home Depot was open, and doing a lot of business for people making repairs.  One of the cashiers commented that she went from home to work and work to home, trying not to look around and see what had become of her city.  We saw a Walgreen’s and a gas station open in the time we were there.   Each opening was greeted with great rejoicing.  The gas station had an ATM on the premises, the only one available for miles around because all the banks were closed.  It also used a Port-a-Potty because it had no running water.  There were shopping malls were everything was working.   They were extremely bustling, partly (I assume) because there weren’t many places to shop and partly (I assume) as part of the desperate attempt by people to distract themselves from the conditions all around.  Fire stations had re-opened.  Schools had not.

And recall that about 80% of the people had been evacuated and missed the worst.  The 20% who stayed were a manageable number to rescue.  But in the relatively short time that it took, with the lack of food, water, medicine and sanitation, social discipline started breaking down.

I have not been to Houston, but presumably conditions are similar, except that people are still living there.  I like to think that this means recovery will be quicker because there will be a large work force at hand to clean up.  And certainly it will not be all that far a drive to unflooded parts of Texas with plenty of resources at hand.

Now compare Puerto Rico.  Puerto Rico did get the full force of Category 4 winds.  Numerous buildings are not just flooded, but destroyed.  Staying warm will not be an issue, since Puerto Rico is hot and muggy.  But how will people stay dry?  The power is out over 90% of the island.  This is a worse disaster than, say, loss of power in Haiti where many people never had electricity in the first place and society operated without it.  Loss of electricity where people depend on it is a formula for disaster.  Less than half the people have access to clean water.  Food supplies must be running out fast.  The roads and entire infrastructure is destroyed, preventing supplies from being shipped in.  People in the mountains can presumably at least come down to the cities looking for relief supplies.  But how does a city, itself in ruins, cope with such an influx?  Puerto Rico is an island, making overland evacuation impossible; everyone leaving must go by ship.  It has 3.5 million inhabitants.  Evacuation is impossible. 

This is what it looks like when a whole society is truly destroyed all at once.