The Latest Power Outage in Puerto Rico
A few days ago I went to Puerto Rico and landed just when the island lost power. For ~40 hours, I was with my family living among “the locals” and what I saw surprised me. Puerto Ricans are so adapted to living without power that they have normalized the experience and changed their habits around making do with the instability of their infrastructure.
First, everybody I talked to, in one form or another, said something along the lines of “ever since María…” The UBER driver, my uncle, a high school friend, and needless to say my family. It is clear that the trauma of the hurricane is still an everyday memory for them. And those memories come back in a hurry when power goes out and leaving them in the dark almost two full days. Furthermore, the scarcity of goods is still a reality. My mom’s dinning room door is still a plywood covering a whole of what used to be a glass sliding door leading to the backyard that was destroyed by the hurricane. It has taken years to either find replacement fixtures or to find qualified contractors to do the work.
Second, living without power, or without the stability of power, has changed life significantly. The restrictions imposed by Covid have also forced changes, as if they needed another reason to deal with the unexpected. During this past power outage, restaurants closed around 7 or 8pm because it wasn’t safe to stay open late when everything in the street was pitch black. They had power generators to prepare food, but in the evenings they closed early fearing for the safety of their employees and clients. Needless to say that the evenings became the setting for spooky/eerie scenes feeling as if you were in some desolated city. This early closing time for restaurants was unspoken, understood and almost normal. I heard someone say “they close around 7 or 8 like they used to do after María.”
Third, traffic lights were completely off, not intermittently blinking but off. Puerto Ricans are not known to be patient drivers. Yet I didn’t hear a single honk of the horn in two days when we drove through many intersections all over San Juan and Carolina. It was so normal that I didn’t realize we were crossing crazy intersections without an issue till the second day of my trip. People learned (adapted?) to cross the intersection without the use of the traffic lights. Don’t get me wrong, we did not become civilized motorists taking turns at the intersection (“no, no, after you, please”), that would have been an unrealistic miracle. Nevertheless, people managed the challenges knowing we were all in the same boat, so to speak.
Fourth, during the day, people’s routine included charging phones, fans, lamps, and laptops in their cars so they would be available at night. This was just so normal that my sister referred to her car as “my charging station.” They had splitters and cables to connect multiple usb-enabled devices in the car. Again, this was just a normal part of the day, “let’s go sit in the car for 30 minutes while the phone charges.” And it wasn’t power only, they lost water service for the better part of a day during the power outage. I found out my family had dozens of large plastic juice containers filled with water, saved to use them in the toilets just for the occasion when the water goes out (not if, but when). Just a normal part of life.
Finally, and one that shocked me the most was the power generators. My family had one, a small one that could run the refrigerator. They never took it out during this two day outage. It needed gas and nobody wanted to stand in line at the gas station to get gas. I heard of their stories to get gas in their cars after María. Someone told me that they got in line at 6am and didn’t get gas till 8pm. All day long in line to fill the tank of the car. So, needless to say, they were not looking forward to a repeat of that experience. Not to mention that most jobs continued even without power, so nobody had the privilege to just go stand in line. Oh, and this time the power outage was not expected to last, just a day or two. Normalized…
One more on the power generators. They are noisy, but you get used to the noise. They sound like a truck that pulls over in front of your house and never leaves. Several of my family’s neighbors had one. On day 2, all of a sudden, a neighbor’s power generator turns off. Silence. I barely noticed it, only feeling the “ah that’s a nice silence” that your subconscious alerts you of the new peace and quiet. But just as the sound dies down, one of my siblings jumps up and runs to flip the light switch in the living room. My other sibling says “no, no”… and I am super confused. The coincidence of the silence and the quick jump to action seemed connected but I couldn’t understand it. Well they were connected. If/when the power comes back, some power generators turn off automatically. One sibling interpreted the silence as a possibility that the power came back and went to test that hypothesis. My other sibling somehow had timed the use of the power generator and knew that it simply ran out of gas. I felt like I was observing some strange ritual that the locals had developed in response to seeing patterns in the clouds.
The biggest lesson (crime?) of all was once again the government response. The governor was in Spain and basically said “I will come back if I am needed.” WTF? Then the two groups in charge of power generation and distribution just pointed fingers at each other (I don’t need to give names to the sides because it is clear of who is who). One group even blamed FEMA which prompted a quick response from the Federal Agency clarifying the protocols in place to request aid and how one of the two groups had not submitted a single request. The director of one of the groups in a press conference said some pretty surprising things. First, he was happy(?) that this power outage was covered in the Washington Post and other newspapers in the US. That’s a badge of honor, really? Reminds me of Navin Johnson, Steve Martin’s character in the Jerk, being happy because his name was printed in a book, the phonebook. But that wasn’t enough. He proceeded to say something along the lines of “people are letting a snowy day ruin what otherwise was a beautiful spring season.” Huh? Needless to say, from then on he was referred as The Poet and I even saw one person ask “Do we have another Poetry Session tomorrow?” What a clusterf*ck.
My final observation is that the government of Puerto Rico continues to be ineffective. And before you blame Puerto Ricans, you must understand the complexities of life on the island (or more appropriately, in a colony). The strangle hold that the Junta Fiscal has placed on the government has made their service to the people of Puerto Rico of equal importance and influence as the Show del Mediodía (local noon variety TV show). They are both entertaining to watch but neither has any power to solve the problems that the people of Puerto Rico. Ironically, they are both funny with few instances of cringe inducing jokes (or official press releases) and provide very little hope for the future. The people of Puerto Rico can rest with confidence knowing that they can charge their phones in their cars, use rain water to flush the toilets, and be ready for yet another poetry session in the near future.
