Puerto Rico faces weeks without electricity in wake of Maria

Associated Press

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico

The sky was darkening Thursday afternoon as 10-year-old Sarah Jimenez laid out three plastic buckets on her grandmother’s patio in hopes of capturing rainwater.

“We can use it to at least flush the toilets,” she told her grandmother.

A day after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, flooding towns, crushing homes and killing at least two people, millions of people on the island faced the dispiriting prospect of weeks and even months without electricity.

The storm knocked out the entire power grid across the U.S. territory of 3.4 million, leaving them without electricity to light their homes, cook or pump water.

As a result, Sarah and others hunted for gas canisters for cooking, collected rainwater or prepared themselves mentally for the hardships to come in the tropical heat. Some contemplated leaving the island.

“You cannot live here without power,” said Hector Llanos, a 78-year-old retired New York police officer who planned to go back to the U.S. mainland Saturday to live there temporarily.

Like many Puerto Ricans, Llanos does not have a generator or gas stove. “The only thing I have is a flashlight,” he said, shaking his head. “This is never going to return to normal.”

Maria’s death toll across the Caribbean, meanwhile, climbed to at least 19, nearly all of them on the hard-hit island of Dominica.

As of Thursday evening, Maria was moving off the northern coast of the Dominican Republic with winds of 120 mph. The storm was expected to approach the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Bahamas early today.

From there, it is expected to veer into the open Atlantic, no threat to the U.S. mainland.

In Puerto Rico, the grid was in sorry shape long before Maria struck.

The territory’s multibillion-dollar debt crisis has left agencies such as the state power company broke. It abandoned most basic maintenance in recent years, leaving the island subject to regular blackouts.

“We knew this was going to happen given the vulnerable infrastructure,” Gov. Ricardo Rossello said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would open an air bridge from the mainland today, with three to four military planes flying to the island every day carrying water, food, generators and temporary shelters.

Rossello said his administration was trying to open ports soon to receive shipments of food, water, generators, cots and other supplies.

The government has hired 56 small contractors to clear trees and put up new power lines and poles and will be sending tanker trucks to supply neighborhoods as they run out of water.

Fifty-four of the island’s 78 municipalities have been declared federal disaster zones.