On Tuesday, January 7, 2020, at 4:24 AM we awoke to a 6.4 earthquake in San Juan, where I sometimes live with my partner. Electricity went out across the island in what the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) called a “protective blackout,” designed to prevent further damage to the already fragile grid. Throughout the ensuing days we have continued to feel strong aftershocks, part of an unusual “seismic swarm” that has brought over 150 earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 2.5 in the past week and a half, and eight at more than M5.0, including the January 7th event that made the morning news back in the USA. In fact, strong tremors continue as I write this. My partner and I are safe in a well-constructed, urban apartment building, and San Juan is all the way on the other side of the island, far from the epicenters of recent quakes. People on the southern coast are not so lucky. Widespread structural damage and one fatality have been reported in the areas from Ponce to Yauco to Guánica. My partner’s family lives in the Ponce area, and his concern is that the daily earthquakes are weakening infrastructure already long overdue for maintenance and modernization.
“Imagine,” he says, “that a section of one of the bridges collapses during a quake. When I was a kid that happened when the Coamo River flooded and took out a section of the interstate. It was dark and raining, so no one could see that the road was missing, and people drove off the edge. It was terrible.”
I picture a parallel scenario. The government issues a tsunami warning, and since there is no electricity, there’s no illumination on the broken roads. As cars stream out of the city of Ponce, they either drive off the end of the bridge and pile-up below, or everyone stops just short of the gap, putting them at risk of being engulfed from behind. Such a dark scenario is not glass-half-empty catastrophizing, but a real possibility. While Puerto Rico has resumed a semblance of normalcy in the wake of the September 2017 hurricane (Maria) — businesses are open and telephone poles no longer litter the streets like a clearcut forest — the lingering wounds of that disaster have been exacerbated by a policy of economic austerity. Too many homes, especially in the countryside, still have blue tarps instead of roofs. Winding roads that used to be two lanes and were partially washed out remain that way: temporary barriers walling off the missing lane have become more or less permanent. Many of the traffic signals and street lights in towns along the southeastern coast, where Maria first made landfall as a category 5 storm, are still mangled and inoperable, reoriented by the 150mph winds so that they all face impotently away from the roads they were designed to illuminate. In San Juan, not the beautiful, 500-year-old, Spanish colonial tourist center where cruise ships park for the day, but the modern section of the capital-city where most Puerto Ricans live, sinkholes open in streets and sidewalks, filling with the drifts of garbage that seem to be everywhere. Slowly rising sea levels, beach erosion, and shifting rainfall patterns combine to regularly flood streets in low-lying areas. A walk down Ponce de León, the main street in San Juan, reveals that a surprising number of the striking Modernist, Art Deco, and Spanish Revival buildings are not just vacant, but crumbling under the weight of their own disrepair. A house on the street behind us is literally being subsumed by huge philodendron vines, and a stray pig lives in the vacant lot across the street with a flock of feral chickens. Nightfall is announced by the peeps of coqui frogs, salsa-bachata-merengue music from the local plaza, barking dogs, loud cars racing, and gunfire. A lot of gunfire. There are pockets of wealth in Puerto Rico that wall and gate themselves off, of course, but much of the country is impoverished and in ruins. And the existence of a middle class is made ever more tenuous by low wages, high unemployment, high VAT and other taxes, and soaring real estate prices (tax breaks for offshore investors notwithstanding, which is a whole other can of worms). If it sounds horrible, then I’m not doing a good enough job conveying my ambivalence: it is painfully beautiful, even as it falls apart. Imagine if Brian Ulrich’s Dark Stores, Ghostboxes & Dead Malls were on a lush tropical island where an incipient jungle takes any opportunity to grow over whatever is untended. I told my partner that Puerto Rico looks like pictures I’ve seen of Cuba, to which he replied, “Except that Havana is a much bigger city and the dilapidation is more advanced.” I was hoping he’d correct me with more substantive differences than those.
A house in San Juan, destroyed by hurricane Maria, sat as a pile of rubble until most of it was taken away in 2019. This is what remains.
The images in this post do not show earthquake damage, but evidence of a long economic decline resulting from a combination of fickle US Congressional policy on tax abatements in the territory, and local mismanagement and corruption. THE major obstacle to recovery from anything in Puerto Rico is the country’s debt crisis. There’s just not enough money to maintain what’s here, let alone rebuild. At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, it goes something like this: US Congress removed an incentive that had created a pharmaceutical industry boom in Puerto Rico, so those companies downsized and many moved away from PR. As a result, government revenue plummeted and unemployment increased. Puerto Rico issued more municipal bonds to make up the difference, but it doesn’t appear much of that money was spent on public projects. Infrastructure was neglected, especially the electrical grid. Eventually they were selling new bonds to pay interest on old bonds, and then they defaulted on the loans. Many bond holders are older Puerto Ricans who were counting on the money for retirement, but the most influential investors are large financial entities from the USA. They convinced the congress and Obama administration to pass a law that appointed a paternalistic advisory board to enforce austerity and repayment of the $72 billion debt, yet the public has not been permitted to see an audit of the runaway borrowing and spending that got them into this situation. No one knows what the money was spent on, but schools have been closed, and services have been slashed. A friend fell into a hole in the sidewalk and broke his arm. Thousands of people were laid off as their jobs were made redundant, driving even more people to seek unemployment benefits or migrate to the mainland US to find work. Puerto Ricans are Americans, though our country treats them like they’re The Help. The high taxes I mentioned above are not being used to pay for public improvements, but mostly to service the debt. And all of the (Harvard and Yale and other US-educated) Puerto Rican elected officials who (mis)appropriated all that bond income? Están bien. This spiraling deterioration was well underway long before the 45th president of the United States withheld hurricane relief funds appropriated by Congress, and before he casually tossed paper towels at hurricane survivors and mocked the way they pronounce the name of their own country.
A tangle of wires delivers power to homes and businesses in San Juan
Electricity was restored at our place on Friday, January 10 at 12:31 AM, though there are still many Puerto Ricans without power. The reason I know the precise time our power returned is because the applause, whistles, ululations, and celebratory shouts of our whole neighborhood woke me up, and then I felt the breeze from the oscillating fan on my sweaty back. The electricity has flickered off and on with recent strong winds, and of course, the earthquakes continue daily. The magnitude 5.9 quake on Saturday, January 11 has many wondering when this period of constant seismic activity, already in its third week, will taper off. In Jacaguas, a town just outside of Ponce, church services were held outside under the blazing sun because no one felt safe indoors. Many of the residents of Guánica had taken shelter in the Municipal Coliseum until local authorities declared the building unstable. Those with the means to evacuate elsewhere have done so, and those who remain are sleeping on cots in the parking lot. Now that power is back to about half of San Juan, hopefully the traffic signals will be working. It’s been impressive to watch the city’s cars, busses, trucks, and pedestrians negotiate intersections without stop lights, but it’s obviously trying everyone’s patience. I told my partner that Puerto Rico offers a preview of the coming century as the climate crisis increases the frequency of disasters, and governments, even rich ones, are overwhelmed by the scale of damage and migration. There’s an old song by The Police that keeps playing in my head as I notice how things in PR have declined in the past six years; and yet, there’s still sublime beauty to see, and so much joyful celebration on just about any evening after the heat of the day dissipates. If you have the privilege to visit PR, try one of my favorite dishes: mofongo de yuca relleno de bacalao. You can click on the link above to hear The Police song, and I’ve embedded a more upbeat reaction by the inimitable Macha Colón, below, to leave with you some flamboyantly good vibes. This cognitive dissonance, at least for my North American mind, might be summed-up in an awkward interaction I had before leaving Ohio in December:
“We’re not sure we can mail that to you in Puerto Rico. Who’s going to pay the international shipping fees?”
“Um, it’s domestic.”
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
Visit redcross.org, call 1-800-redcross, or text the word redcross to 90999 to make a $10 donation.
If you're here in San Juan and you can drop-off items or volunteer your time, click here to contact our upstairs neighbor, Juan Botta, who is making the journey southward a few times each week with a van full of donated supplies.
SOURCES:
Ayala, Edmy, Mazzei, Patricia, and Robles, Frances. “After Homes Collapse in Earthquake, Puerto Ricans Ask: Are We Safe?,” New York Times, January 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/us/puerto-rico-earthquake.html
Chavez, Nicole, Hanna, Jason, and Santiago, Leyla. “A deadly earthquake has most of Puerto Rico with no power, no water and residents fear tremors will bring more destruction,” CNN, January 8, 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/07/us/puerto-rico-earthquake-tuesday/index.html
Financial Management & Oversight Board for Puerto Rico, https://oversightboard.pr.gov/
“Income drops for 65% of Puerto Rico households,” Caribbean Business, December 7, 2017, https://caribbeanbusiness.com/household-incomes-decline-in-65-of-puerto-rico/
Johnson, Karl G., and Quiñones, Ferdinand. The Floods of May 17-18, 1985 and October 6-7, 1985 in Puerto Rico, U.S. Geological Society Open-File Report 87-123, San Juan, PR 1987, https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1987/0123/report.pdf
Macha Colón y los Okapi. “Jaya,” Tanquesito de Amor, Music Dorks Studio, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2K__dfInfY
The Police. “When the World is Running Down,” Zenyetta Mondatta, Wisseloord Studios, 1980, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXYW7kZP6jc
“Power Outage Map,” Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, https://aeepr.com/en-us/servicios/Pages/PowerOutageMap.aspx
Reeves, Christian. “A Detailed Analysis of Puerto Rico’s Tax Incentive Programs,” Premier Offshore, August 5, 2017, https://premieroffshore.com/detailed-analysis-puerto-ricos-tax-incentive-programs/
Schmidt, Samantha. “There was once a bridge here: A devastated Puerto Rico community deals with isolation after Maria,” Washington Post, September 26, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/there-was-once-a-bridge-here-a-devastated-puerto-rico-community-deals-with-isolation-after-maria/2017/09/26/772c3a62-a2ca-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html
Timm, Jane C. “Fact check: Trump says Puerto Rico got $92 billion. They've seen only a fraction,” NBC News, July 18, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-trump-says-puerto-rico-got-92-billion-they-n1031276
Trelles, Luis. “Debt,” Radio Ambulante, December 20, 2016, https://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/debt
“Trump throws paper towel rolls into crowd while delivering aid supplies in Puerto Rico,” The Washington Post, October 3, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/trump-throws-paper-towel-rolls-into-crowd-while-delivering-aid-supplies-in-puerto-rico/2017/10/03/c988ac46-a86f-11e7-9a98-07140d2eed02_video.html
“Trump attempts to use Spanish accent to pronounce Puerto Rico - video,” The Guardian, October 7, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2017/oct/07/trump-attempts-to-use-spanish-accent-to-pronounce-puerto-rico-video
Ulrich, Brian, “Dark Stores, Ghostboxes & Dead Malls,” 2008 - 2012, http://notifbutwhen.com/darkstores/
United States Geological Survey Earthquake Map, https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/