Heavy rain causes catastrophic damage in a country that began recovering from the devastation ‘Mary’ wrought five years ago
Anyone who has experienced a traumatic loss knows the heartbreaking effect of anniversaries. On Sunday, two days before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 and caused the deaths of 3,000 people, nature sent another atmospheric phenomenon prepared with memory. “It is enough to see the faces of the people in the areas most affected by ‘María’ when we order them to be evacuated,” said the head of the National Guard, José Juan Reyes.
A priori, Hurricane ‘Fiona’ seemed more manageable than the ghost of ‘Maria’, being a Category 1 cyclone, but it was accompanied by torrential rains that collected more water in just three hours than the entire city had seen combined from Ponce in its history. But it didn’t stop there. The sky continued to drain all day and night as if it were the universal deluge. And at dawn, the rain continued, with no sign of abating.
“This is not over yet,” Ernesto Morales, head of the National Meteorological Service, warned at a news conference. “More rain is expected to fall on the island, so this is serious, gentlemen, at least it won’t stop until Wednesday.” And besides, it literally rained on wet. “Our bottoms 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 expected,” he said to the surprise of many.
It wasn’t just the storm. Five years after “María,” “a historic event concentrated in the La Plata basin,” Morales recalled, Puerto Rico barely got up. The floods washed away everything they found and turned the debris into ammunition from the water to bring down the small rebuilt infrastructure. This is how the river knocked down the brand new Utuado Bridge, designed to last 75 years, despite being considered a temporary structure. The permanent works are said to have started in 2024.
Before nightfall, the electrical infrastructure failed, leaving 1.3 million people, nearly half of the population, in limbo. Emergency services 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.
For many, the situation was much more catastrophic than what they experienced with “Maria,” as the damage was more concentrated then, “but it served as a lesson for the response team,” the governor said. Out of this came an ordinance that has forced all hospitals to have their generators ready. The pharmacies on duty continue to operate, even dispensing drugs without a medical signature in the 128 shelters where thousands of people and hundreds of pets were overcrowded, thanks to the Good Samaritan law, which was automatically activated “so that there is no reluctance to serve the people,” the governor encouraged. . “90% of patients have their medicines, we don’t need more,” the health minister proudly proclaimed, although that figure excludes 10% of patients.
There are also four warehouses with seven million food items and four million liters of water, immediately available if a disaster is declared. Five years ago, the island only had one. The same one Donald Trump reluctantly visited in October 2017, nearly two weeks after the hurricane devastated the island. On Monday, the governor said he immediately received numerous messages on his cellphone from top officials in the government of Washington and some states such as New York and New Jersey. New York Governor Kathy Hochul immediately dispatched a hundred Spanish-speaking rescue workers to assist the former Spanish colony, which was never fully assimilated by the American Empire after its defeat in 1898.
Source: La Verdad
I am an experienced and passionate journalist with a strong track record in news website reporting. I specialize in technology coverage, breaking stories on the latest developments and trends from around the world. Working for Today Times Live has given me the opportunity to write thought-provoking pieces that have caught the attention of many readers.
