On anniversary of Hurricane Maria, new storm leaves Puerto Rico in the dark

Hurricane Fiona deluged Puerto Rico with unrelenting rain and terrifying flash floods on Monday, forcing harrowing home rescues and making it difficult for power crews to reach many parts of the island.
Now the island is once again in darkness, five years after Hurricane Maria inflicted more damage on Puerto Rico than any other disaster in recent hory.
While Fiona will be the direct culprit, Puerto Ricans will also blame years of power disruptions, the result of an agonizingly slow effort to finally give the island a stable grid. Hurricane Maria, a near-Category 5 storm, hit on Sept. 20, 2017, leaving about 3,000 dead and damaging 80% of the system. The last house was not reconnected to the system until nearly a year later. Hurricane Fiona, with far less ferocious winds, is the strongest storm to reach the island since.
Its copious rains on Sunday and Monday — more than 30 inches in some areas in southern Puerto Rico and its central mountainous region — caused the island’s vast lattice of canals and creeks to swell, turned entire streets into muddy rivers and forced the rescues of more than 1,000 people. At least one person died, while operating a generator, while another death was recorded in the Dominican Republic.
“I’ve never seen this in my life, not even in Maria,” said Ada Belmot Plaza, who had to be rescued the Puerto Rico National Guard as wa-high floodwaters rose outside her daughter’s house in the El Coquí neighborhood of Salinas, on Puerto Rico’s southern coast.
More than 1,000 residents were rescued across Puerto Rico after the passing of Hurricane Fiona, while mudslides swept across the Dominican Republic. (Erika P. Rodriguez/The New York Times)
Some Puerto Ricans said Hurricane Fiona took them surprise, and many in the hardest-hit areas were still waiting for government help Monday as neighbors came together to clear fallen trees from roads and remove debris from homes. Gov. Pedro R. Pierluisi urged people to stay indoors. He said he expected most electricity to be back up “in a matter of days.” Monday morning, power had been restored to some 100,000 customers, out of 1.5 million.
The federal government paid $3.2 billion to patch up the island’s electrical grid in Hurricane Maria’s wake. But that was just to get the power back on; Congress earmarked an additional $10 billion to modernize the antiquated and inefficient system.
Because the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority is bankrupt, the fiscal board appointed Congress to oversee the island’s finances required that the power transmission and dribution system be privatized before funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency could go to any upgrades.
In 2020, Puerto Rico awarded a 15-year contract to LUMA Energy, a private Canadian-American consortium, for a fixed annual fee of $115 million. After taking over in June of last year, the company quickly struggled with rolling summer blackouts. There was an islandwide outage in April, with no bad weather in sight.
And so, in the wake of Hurricane Fiona, most Puerto Ricans face the daunting prospect of spoiled food and medication, sticky nights and the other familiar risks and indignities of being plunged into darkness. They are somewhat better equipped this time because those who could afford generators bought them after the Hurricane Maria fiasco. But that came with its own dangers: Officials on Monday said a man died while trying to operate a generator. His wife suffered severe burns, but survived.
In the Dominican Republic, the storm killed at least one person, a 68-year-old man who was hit a falling tree in the northern province of María Trinidad Sánchez, according to local media.
As Hurricane Fiona moved westward, it battered the eastern provinces of the Dominican Republic, home to one of the largest tourism industries in the Caribbean. Heavy rain and 90-mph winds set off mudslides that shuttered resorts and damaged highways, officials said.
The storm is expected to pass near the islands of Turks and Caicos on Tuesday before strengthening at sea into a major hurricane — a Category 3 or higher — Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center said. It is not forecast to approach the East Coast of the United States.
In Puerto Rico, overflowing waterways and the loss of power caused pumps to fail, leaving 70% of households and businesses that rely on the public water and sewer system without potable water.
Pierluisi said he had been coordinating with the White House to receive assance. President Joe Biden issued an emergency declaration on Sunday, unlocking federal funding and FEMA support. Biden called Pierluisi from Air Force One as the president flew back from the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London, according to the White House.
States also lined up to send mutual aid. New York said more than 100 Spanish-speaking members of the State Police would help clear streets, direct traffic and respond to other needs in Puerto Rico.
Most customers who had electricity on Monday, including a couple of hospitals, were in the San Juan metropolitan area, which was spared the worst of Hurricane Fiona’s rains.
The damage from Fiona’s floodwaters is expected to be vast — in the “billions,” Pierluisi estimated — a sobering reminder that a storm’s categorization under the Saffir-Simpson scale considers its maximum wind speeds, but not its rainfall or storm surge potential.
In the town of Cayey, residents had to clear out the mud after the La Plata River surged and almost completely submerged a two-story house. A temporary bridge erected over the Guaonica River in Utuado buckled, its demise captured on dramatic video as rushing waters and debris washed it away. The bridge was put up after Hurricane Maria to connect devastated neighborhoods in the area, and a new, permanent bridge was scheduled to go up in 2024.
In Santa Isabel, on the southern coast of the island, Itzamary Alvarado said she had more water in her house than during Hurricane Maria. Government officials, she said, should have given the public more warning about Hurricane Fiona, which had initially approached the island as a tropical storm.
“I think the government minimized what was going to happen,” Alvarado said. “I found out it was a hurricane at 11 a.m. on Sunday, so I left everything and ran to the supermarket. I had not prepared for a hurricane.”
For her and many others, the storm was a test of whether the government response to disasters would be better after Maria.
“We have been struggling for five years and see the same conditions from the government in the management of emergency situations,” Alvarado said. “It’s frustrating.”
But she suddenly had a sign that things were changing for the better: Trucks from Puerto Rico’s power company, LUMA, appeared on her street.
A street flooded after the passing of Hurricane Fiona in Barrio Playita, a neighborhood in Salinas, Puerto Rico. (Erika P. Rodriguez/The New York Times)
“A LUMA brigade just drove my house,” she said. “I’ve never seen that before.”
Comparisons to Hurricane Maria were inevitable, from both residents and officials.
The island’s hospitals were running on backup generators, in stark contrast to 2017, when many lost power, damaging medical equipment and leaving hundreds of sick patients dangerously at risk. About 75% of cellphone towers were still functioning after the storm passed, compared with the near-total signal wipeout five years ago.
Pierluisi stressed that officials were still in the rescue-and-response phase of the emergency and had not begun to assess the scale of the damage, or determine the island’s path to recovery. Still, he said, the local government’s response had so far been “exemplary” compared with what happened after Maria.
“Maria served as a lesson, an exercise for our emergency response teams at all levels,” Pierluisi, a member of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party who took office in 2021, said in a news conference. “In terms of the coordination we’ve seen, there’s a big difference.”
Hurricane Maria, which struck within weeks of Hurricane Irma in 2017, laid bare the tenuous state of the island’s aging, poorly maintained infrastructure. Its powerful winds, with gusts exceeding 100 mph, destroyed thousands of homes and wiped out the island’s agriculture and access to communications. Recovery was painfully sluggish, and the lack of potable water, fuel and food supplies in the wake of the storm prompted an exodus of tens of thousands of residents to the U.S. mainland.
Public fury bubbled up at the government’s response to the storm. In 2019, a grassroots movement channeling the anger formed, fueling a popular uprising in 2019 that lasted 15 days and caused former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló to step down.
Puerto Ricans remain skeptical of their leaders’ abilities to respond to disasters. In Salinas on Monday, Ana Medina Cardona, 74, said government reconstruction contractors had repaired a section of her tin roof that was torn apart Hurricane Maria.
On Sunday, rain started pouring through that repaired roof while she was home with her dog, Famy.
“It seems they didn’t do a great job, because water was coming down the walls,” Medina Cardona said. “This time around, it was even worse than in Maria.”
She waited in a shelter to hear if the water had receded enough for her to return home. But she was unconvinced it was her best option.
“If we can go back,” she said, “that also means going back there to a house without power.”