When Brig. Gen. Jose Reyes — the assistant adjutant general of the Puerto Rico National Guard — boarded a helicopter to survey Hurricane Maria’s damage to his island home, he felt mixed emotions.
“I look at my beautiful island of Puerto Rico all damaged, houses without roofs, and I don’t see any green because all the vegetation was completely destroyed, it’s a very sad feeling,” Reyes, who was born and raised on the island, told the Military Times Saturday.
“On the other side, it’s a truly touching feeling because I’ve seen people coming out of their homes with machete on hand and anything they can grab to clear the roads, to help other people to get back on their feet, working shoulder to shoulder without being asked,” he said.
Although Puerto Rico remains “in an emergency situation,” it is on the road to recovery, Lt. Gen. Jeff Buchanan, the commander of ground forces on the island, said Saturday in an interview with Military Times.
About 60 percent of Puerto Ricans have access to potable water, Buchanan said. That doesn’t even include the more than 15 million bottles of water, and 763,000 gallons of purified water the military has delivered since arriving, and continues to push out from the ports on a daily basis, he added.
Additionally, of the island’s 67 hospitals, 62 are operational, Reyes said. And 18 of those hospitals are back to running off the power grid, he said.
“I’ve gotten everything that I’ve asked for from Northern Command and the Department of Defense,” Buchanan said. “It’s just harder when it’s an island.”
Recovery efforts have had a real impact as the supply chain of relief has slowly pushed out into the mountainous interior of the island, Reyes said. That’s where roughly a third of Puerto Ricans live, and has been one of the most difficult areas for supplies to reach as workers clear the roads of debris, he added.
“Some of the roads, especially secondary and tertiary roads, have been cleared more than three times because of landslides and mudslides,” Reyes said. “It’s not all holding, especially up in the mountains.”
Some have contrasted the federal government’s response in Puerto Rico to that of Texas and Florida, but that is based on a faulty premise, Buchanan said. One situation involves well-resourced states where the damage was primarily to the coastal areas, while the other involves an island territory that had poor infrastructure from the start and faced a more ferocious storm, he said.
“This was a Category 5 hurricane, stronger than Harvey or Irma when it actually hit the United States, certainly much stronger than Katrina,” Buchanan said. “It was one of the ten most powerful storms recorded in the history of the Atlantic Ocean, and this includes storms that never came ashore.”
Similar comparisons between the United States’ humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake on Haiti and that of Puerto Rico fail to put the crisis in perspective as well, he said.
Puerto Rico’s government is “tracking 49 or 50 deaths, and every single one of those is tragic for this disaster, but in Haiti, I think we had 316,000 deaths,” Buchanan said. “It’s just a completely different situation.”
Power is still out
As authorities continue to navigate the disaster, the major limitation to returning the island to a level of normality is stabilizing the electrical grid, Reyes said.
“The main government priority right now is to restore electricity around the island, because the economy has to be restored back to normality to get things going,” Reyes said.
The U.S. Army Corps of engineers has been working to restore the island’s electrical grid, but new power lines are going to be needed for it to be fully functional, Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite said Friday during a Pentagon press briefing.
“This is where we have our work cut out for us,” Semonite said. “Right now, we’ve got about 21.6 percent of that [power] up.”
In the meantime, the Army is working to provide 400 to 500 temporary generators to the island to fill short-term needs, Semonite said.
The need for a stable electrical grid can’t be underscored enough, Reyes said.
“I live in a metropolitan area and I don’t even have water or electricity at my apartment. When I go home, I sleep on the balcony because it’s too hot inside the apartment,” Reyes said. “Electricity is a key part of bringing stability. ... We haven’t gotten to that point yet.”
But in order to deal with Puerto Rico’s woes, it will need a long-term plan to address the crumbling infrastructure, as well as the sluggish economy that existed long before Hurricane Maria, Reyes said.
“The electrical grid infrastructure in Puerto Rico was built back in the ’50s and ’60s, so it was not Maria-proof. We need to rebuild the infrastructure to be more resilient, because we are in the hurricane path and every year we might get another Maria,” Reyes said. “When you look at the situation on Puerto Rico prior to Maria, the economy was already fragile, the infrastructure was already fragile, so it’s like the worst situation to happen.”
Unfortunately, the long-term solution is not something the military can resolve, Buchanan said. That burden falls on Congress and Puerto Rico’s local officials, he said.
“The people who are going to be here the longest are FEMA, because they help rebuild and we really don’t do that in the military. We just do the emergency response,” Buchanan said.
Some parts of the military’s mission, like medical operations, will remain on the island for a long time, Buchanan said. Eventually, though, the military effort will wind down and cede control to FEMA, contractors and the National Guard, he said.
“Puerto Rico has been hit by hurricanes before ... and it’s going to get hit again in the future,” Buchanan said. “I think it is between the governor, the commonwealth and the U.S. Congress to sort out how resilient they want to make it in the future. It’s not the military’s job to do this. We respond in the emergency to put out the fires.”
Still, Buchanan said the military would stay on the island as long as the conditions remains an emergency, and he put no timeline on his own departure.
Kyle Rempfer was an editor and reporter who has covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq.
