The Aftermath of Hurricane Maria

Traveling through the town of Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, it was clear a disaster had torn the town apart. Old, abandoned, broken boats sat on the grassy fields, fences lining the rural town were left bent and twisted in unnatural ways, occasional blue tarps lined the sides of buildings as if they had been tossed aside along with some strapped to the tops of houses protecting the broken roofs.  This is the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, one of the most destructive hurricanes in Puerto Rico’s modern times and the third costliest in U.S. history, according to a 2020 MIT Case Study by Yiyuan Quin.

A closed down, abandoned restaurant, Grill and BBQ, sat at the entrance of the town with tape falling off the large sign on the front of the building. The scene is one you would expect to see from a natural disaster that recently happened. However, Hurricane Maria hit this town and the rest of Puerto Rico almost five years ago.

On Sept. 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria swept through Puerto Rico damaging the island beyond repair. Countless lives were lost in the disaster and residents of the island are still facing repercussions to this day. According to Quin’s case study, “Hurricane Maria caused over $90 billion in damage, approximately 3,000 to 5,000 deaths, and an exodus of more than 150,000 people in the two months after.”

Glenilex Trinta Rivera and Ariana Delgado were two of those residents living in Yabucoa that left for the states after the hurricane hit. Trinta Rivera was 21 when the eye of the hurricane swept over Yabucoa.

Trinta Rivera passed the hurricane in her home with her two daughters and grandmother. Her windows were broken in and her home was flooded. Before Hurricane Maria the electricity was good in the town, but now there are two or three hours every day with no electricity. Working at a bar, Trinta Rivera said she comes in for her work shift at 2 p.m. and the lights are on only every so often. Still to this day, Trinta Rivera washes her clothes in the river with a rock. “I save water, food and everything in case something happens again,” said Trinta Rivera.

According to the Federal Emergency Managements Agency’s (FEMA) After Action Report (AAR), “Maria left Puerto Rico’s 3.7 million residents without electricity. The resulting response represents the longest sustained air mission of food and water delivery in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) history.”

Though the eye of the hurricane passed through Yabucoa, many other towns across the island suffered equal, if not worse damage. Residents of the island were left with almost nothing after the hurricane hit. With extensive damage to homes and no way of making money, people had no choice but to leave Puerto Rico.

Sociocultural Programming Assistant at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Kiara Rosado, now 23, was 19 and living in Moca, Puerto Rico with her parents at the time of the hurricane. She was one of the many people who left Puerto Rico after it hit. For Rosado, moving back to Milwaukee, the town she was born in, had been a goal of hers for a while. The hurricane was not her main reason for the move, however, the frustrations she felt in the aftermath of the hurricane contributed to her decision in the end. According to Rosado, people flooded the airports, some even leaving their cars behind to be towed with no hope of ever returning.

“I do remember feeling a lot of frustration because even after I left to come to Milwaukee a few months after it hit, I remember seeing houses covered in blue tarps when I was in the airplane,” said Rosado. “That just broke my heart.”

Rosado passed the hurricane in her home in Moca with her parents.

“I remember vividly listening to the radio and turning on the television two days before the hurricane,” said Rosado. “The meteorologist said, ‘People are going to die, please prepare for the worst, this is catastrophic,’ that’s when it settled that it was real.”

Just two weeks prior, Hurricane Irma passed through parts of the island. According to Rosado, there was a lot of preparation in anticipation of Hurricane Irma, however it turned out to be very mild with just wind and rain. Because of this, people felt they didn’t need to be worried about the warnings of Hurricane Maria. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

“It was shock,” said Rosado. “I had never been through something like that before, and we still had hope that it would miss us. We felt a sense of doom, and we couldn’t do anything but sit tight and wait for it to happen.”

Rosado and her parents spent more than 24 hours indoors during the hurricane, passing the time communicating with relatives through a walkie talkie and cleaning their flooded home. The electricity and running water went out hours before it hit. “It was very scary and very loud,” said Rosado. “You could hear the wind in the trees and everything.”

Many residents of Puerto Rico had similar experiences to Rosado and her family. One of those residents includes Dr. Ricia Anne Chansky, professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez.

Chansky passed the hurricane in her apartment with her partner and cat. Their home suffered minor damages with flooding. But for Chansky, it was the aftermath of the hurricane and the help they didn’t receive that affected her the most.

“I think that some of the things that have bothered us the most is the amount of time it has taken the government to resituate people, how the failures of relief efforts have been quite shocking, and I think that’s our most lasting impact,” said Chansky.

A consistent pattern in the relief efforts of Hurricane Maria have shown the failures of both the Puerto Rican government and the FEMA. During the 2017 hurricane season, the U.S. faced Hurricane Harvey devastating Texas, Hurricane Irma devastating Florida and Hurricane Maria devastating Puerto Rico.

According to Quin’s case study, “A study comparing federal disaster responses to 2017 Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria found that the federal government responded on a larger scale and much more quickly across measures of money and staffing to Harvey and Irma in Texas and Florida, compared with Maria in Puerto Rico, of which the variation was not commensurate with storm severity and need (Willison et al. 2019).”

A comparison graph from Quin’s case study shows that within nine days post landfall Hurricane Harvey received 141.8 million dollars from FEMA money, Hurricane Irma received 92.8 million dollars and Hurricane Maria received just 6.2 million dollars. The graph shows this as a common trend through 180 days post landfall. The most money Maria would receive from FEMA within that time was 1150 million dollars, significantly less than the other two hurricanes.

Chansky saw this reality happen in front of her own eyes. After the hurricane hit, FEMA sent boxes to citizens of Puerto Rico to offer support and extra supplies. However, according to Chansky, these boxes were filled with non-nutritious and non-sustaining foods and above all, they were filled with disappointment.

In Chansky’s box there was a note which according to her read, “The United States government is with you, we are sending all our support to you, we believe in you people of Houston.”

“It was a very challenging moment to receive that box and understand that it was left over from another disaster,” said Chansky.

Adding to the disappointment, Chansky described the lack of help FEMA offered when it came to distributing money to survivors’ pockets. She described the forms sent out as all being online, which at the time was no use to residents who were without electricity. Those who could access the forms were met with misleading questions like, “do you have food,” when in reality they should have read “was all the food in your home destroyed?” Residents would mistake having a single sandwich for having food, but that is not enough to survive long-term.

Rosado was met with similar challenges. She remembers being told that her and her family living in Moca would receive reimbursement for things like spoiled food and house damage.

“A lot of people in my family did not see a penny of that money,” said Rosado.

Similar trends on Quin’s case study graph show that the amount of money that went into survivors’ pockets was significantly less for Maria than the other two hurricanes.

“The differences in the responses to the aftermath of the hurricanes were completely different in Florida and Texas than they were in Puerto Rico. I think we had a president who was either a racist himself or adopted racist retracts to win popularity, and that included not giving the support and aid necessary to Puerto Rico,” said Chansky. “The people of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens and deserve the exact same level of response that anyone else in the U.S. receives.”

Hurricane Maria left residents of Puerto Rico with nothing. Those who were lucky enough to stay in their non-damaged homes still experience loss of electricity, water and food supplies. Drinking water was not clean, simple tasks were not easy, transportation was limited and roads were blocked.

Time stopped for people on the island, banks and businesses closed, hospitals took limited patients, education stopped, children and adults’ lost family members and friends, levels of anxiety and depression rose and above all the Puerto Rican government and FEMA failed their own citizens. While things have gotten better for some, others are still struggling and dealing with the aftermath of the hurricane. It is a disaster that will continue to haunt the residents of the island beyond the five years it already has.

“In my opinion Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States,” said Chansky. “And colonial practices and systemic racism that haunt all of us were on full display on the aftermath of the hurricane.”