Mid February 2018

 

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, just about five months ago. The recovery has been slow. As of two days ago, 25 percent of the people here were still without power. That’s about three quarters of a million people. That is more than the population of Washington, DC, or Baltimore, or Boston. Can you imagine the outcry if any of those cities were without power for five months?

We live in San Juan and the power was restored to our building in mid November. We were lucky – a friend in Old San Juan had to wait until just before Thanksgiving. Another friend, in a near suburb, had to wait until mid January.

But there have been problems here. All of Old San Juan suffered a blackout last Sunday night, the result of a fire at a substation. Friends of ours renting in Ocean Park have had intermittent power outages. A few weeks before, we were in a movie theater in Miramar. The power went out during the previews. We finished our popcorn in the eerie glow of the emergency lighting. The power came back on in time for the movie to start, but went off again after about twenty minutes. The theater gave us a rain check to come back another time. What movie were we trying to see, you ask? Darkest Hour, what else could it have been?

The utilities are still here in force. They have moved the staging areas for their equipment out of Old San Juan so we don’t see the convoys of utility trucks. The linemen are still in the major hotels and so we do see the busses carrying them to their equipment each morning before dawn, and returning just after dark. I ran into a National Grid lineman the other evening in a bar in Old San Juan. He was from Utica, where I grew up, so we had a nice chat. He said they had been working in Rio Piedras, one of the poorer sections of San Juan, for three weeks and had just moved to the Trujillo Alta, a town in the foothills of the central mountains. He, like every utility worker I have talked with, noted how grateful the residents were, offering water, lunch and other treats.

The utility workers are here for four weeks and are then replaced by a new wave of crews. I heard there are two National Grid guys from Croghan, where we have our summer home, here now. I’m sure I’ll run into them at some point, here or there, and compare notes. It should be interesting.

I was on a flight from Philadelphia to San Juan in early February. There were about 50 people from Pennsylvania Power and Light heading here for their first rotation. They are staying in condos in Palmas del Mar, in Humacao, on the east coast. It is a beautiful spot but I doubt they will have much chance to enjoy it. They were a bit anxious and full of questions – was there price gouging? (no); how was the weather? (beautiful); would they be accepted by the people? (yes). I hope their work is going smoothly.

As you might expect, the slow pace of the recovery has engendered stories and rumors. Some residents believe our building manager took advantage of a friend he knew in the power authority to get power back to our building as early as it did. Curiously, the apartment buildings on either side of us were still running on generators into December. The English language newspaper, the San Juan Star, has reported that some PREPA (the Spanish acronym for the power utility) supervisors allegedly asked for money (up to $10,000) to facilitate power restoration in certain neighborhoods.

Some government departments, while overwhelmed with work, seem to be making progress. The  number of intersections with working traffic lights is increasing slowly but steadily. I don’t know what DTOP’s (Spanish acronym for Department of Transportation) protocol is for deciding which intersections to work on, but it does seem the busiest intersections have received attention. I did see a DTOP crew working at an intersection on Avenida Ponce de Leon, the main commercial street through San Juan, the other day.

There are disputes about other issues. For example, the death toll from the two hurricanes has yet to be firmly established. It was originally announced as 54 deaths. The governor, Ricardo Rossello Navares, established a commission to generate an official tabulation. The enabling executive order, promulgated in January, created a working group to establish the official death toll. A report is due in March, but the slow pace of the group’s efforts, and the secrecy surrounding it, caused the Center for Investigative Journalism to sue Wanda Llovet Diaz, director of the Puerto Rico Demographic Registry for access to the data. There has as of yet been no resolution to the law suit. The  mayor of Morovis, a town in the mountains, claims there were 70  storm-related deaths there. It will be interesting to see how this compares to the official registry when it is published.

After Maria, several mainland universities opened their doors to Puerto Rican students. For example, Brown University sent a private jet and transported 40 students to Providence for a year’s study, at no cost to the students. Cornell is hosting 58, New York University about 50, and Tulane enrolled 16 students from Puerto Rico, among other universities.  Professors at the University of Puerto Rico are worried the students won’t return. The program is modeled on programs put in place for students after Hurricane Katrina, but, as has been noted here, UPR opened five weeks after the hurricane, while schools in New Orleans were closed for months.

All of this is happening as the island is working through its financial dilemma. The Oversight and Management Board, put in place as a result of legislation signed by President Obama, has been busy. The Board (PROMESA by its Spanish acronym) selected Citibank Global Markets to oversee the restructuring and privatization PREPA, the island’s utility.  PROMESA has also proposed that government pensions for retired government works (there are about 160,000 of them) be cut by 25%. As you can imagine, the unions representing the workers are upset by that idea.

Residents of San Juan are also worried about the status of the city’s parks. Residents around Parc Centrale asked for and got an official hearing as to why the park is still closed. Parc Centrae has playing fields, open spaces and a walkway along a canal.

But there are some positive signs. Pura Energia, a local affiliate of Sonnen, a global leader in microgrid systems, commissioned a solar + battery system for the K-9 school in the remote mountain town of Orocovis. The solar panels will generate enough power to keep the school open without having to connect to the grid, which in any case is not yet possible because Orocovis is without power and will be for at least several weeks. This is the tenth system installed by Sonnen and Puria Energia since Hurricane Maria, with funding supplied by the del Sol Foundation for Energy Security.

Oh, and there was a car show here this past weekend. Some beautiful cars for sure. And I got my picture taken with a movie star. More on that later, maybe. And no, it was not Stormy Daniels.