Maria slams Puerto Rico one million without power, could be months without power

[MindWars]

Metal roofs were flying off buildings and windows were breaking in San Juan, Puerto Rico even before Hurricane Maria made landfall as a Category 4 storm on the island’s southeastern coast early Wednesday morning. According to the Associated Press, nearly 900,000 people were already without power as the storm approached. Those who sought shelter at a coliseum in San Juan were moved to the building’s second and third floors.

Maria Slams Puerto Rico, One Million Without Power, Could Be Months Without Power
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Power outages , Venezuela without food, floods from hurricanes man if you don't think mother nature isn't pissed off.............. Hmmmm

Areas of Florida still with no power... NY is worried this other Hurricane is going to hit them....

 

[Dalia]

Hurricane Maria at the beginning was a category 1 and it took a power suddenly if I can say so and in terms of direction it should normally stay in the water after its passage in Puerto Rico but this is not certain

 

[ShootSpeeders]

Just read that ALL of PR is now without power.

 

[waltky]

Puerto Rico still suffers after Hurricane Maria...

One Month After Maria, a Crisis Still Rages in Rural Puerto Rico
October 20, 2017, Lives still at risk as economic activity remains at standstill; Residents struggle by candlelight amid looming mudslide threat

A month after Hurricane Maria battered this mountainous stretch of central Puerto Rico, recovery remained elusive along Highway 152, where 82-year-old Carmen Diaz Lopez lives alone in a home that’s one landslide away from plummeting into the muddy creek below. Without electricity, and without family members to care for her, she’s become dependent on the companionship of a few neighbors who stop by periodically. But a collapsed bridge has made it challenging to even communicate with her friend across the creek, so she’s lived for the most part in solitude, passing the electricity-less days singing “Ave Maria” and classic Los Panchos songs to herself, lighting candles each night so she can find the bathroom. “I just ask the Lord to take care of me, because he’s the only one I have,” Diaz Lopez said Wednesday.

A bridge destroyed from Hurricane Maria remains in ruins making travel in the Barranquitas area very difficult.​

Diaz Lopez and her neighbors along Kilometer 5 of this badly hit mountain road in Barranquitas municipality are among the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans still at risk as the recovery effort heads into its fifth week. Pipe water returned here in a trickle a few days ago, and the collapsed earth that blocked the road and sent muck into homes has been half-way cleared. But a phone signal is still non-existent, and residents are far from any semblance of sustainable self-sufficiency. The situation threatens to undermine the economic and fiscal future of the island, and is already fueling a flood of Puerto Ricans leaving for the mainland. At this stage in the recovery from the Category 4 storm, many find the current state of the U.S. commonwealth -- home to some 3.4 million American citizens -- unthinkable. “I just haven’t seen a situation where people don’t have access to basic services for so long,” said Martha Thompson, the Puerto Rico response coordinator for the Boston-based charity Oxfam Americas who also worked on the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Meeting at the White House with the commonwealth’s governor, Ricardo Rossello, President Donald Trump said Thursday that his administration’s response to Maria deserves a perfect “10” rating. He also drew attention to the fiscal mess in Puerto Rico that predated the hurricane, suggesting he wants repayment of any reconstruction loans to take precedence over the island’s existing $74 billion debt that pushed it into bankruptcy. Only tenuous, provisional measures seem to be preventing a much greater humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico. A government task force has restored electricity to many hospitals and healthcare facilities, but others are sustained by diesel generators that occasionally fail. (APR Energy Chairman John Campion, whose company rents the units for natural disasters, said in an interview that such generators typically have a life span of 500 hours, and the crisis has already lasted longer than that.) Almost 80 percent of residents and private businesses -- not just in the rural mountains, but across the island -- are still without electricity.

A boy rides his bicycle past closed stores on a muddy road in Barranquitas​

As of Thursday, one-in-three residents lacked running water, and only about 47 percent of cellular towers were operational. Meanwhile, the official death toll, currently at 48, keeps creeping higher, with 109 islanders still reported missing. Many blame an insufficiently robust federal response, while authorities note the myriad logistical challenges that make the high-poverty island distinct from storm-battered states such as Florida or Texas. Certainly, there have been improvements. In the days after the storm, the entire island appeared engulfed in pandemonium; the airport operated at a fraction of its normal capacity with leaky ceilings, no air conditioning or escalators; frantic islanders formed half-mile long lines for gas and diesel; and mayhem ensued on roads and highways, even in the capital, as people tried to dodge fallen trees and street lights.

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