[News] In Salinas, Puerto Rico, Vulnerable Americans Are Still Trapped in the Ruins Left by Hurricane Maria

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/15/in-salinas-puerto-rico-vulnerable-americans-are-still-trapped-in-the-ruins-left-by-hurricane-maria/ 



  In Salinas, Puerto Rico, Vulnerable Americans Are Still Trapped in the
  Ruins Left by Hurricane Maria

by Stan Cox – Paul Cox 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/stanpaul0120/> - March 15, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

/Abandoned by their country, residents refuse to accept the idea that 
they will never recover./

Nearly a year and a half after Hurricane Maria, about three-fourths of 
the houses in the Sierra Brava neighborhood of Salinas, Puerto Rico 
stand battered and empty.

Some families left because their homes were rendered uninhabitable and 
they had no money to fix them. Others left because they lost their jobs. 
In responding to Maria, federal agencies had hired some local people, 
but just for a few months; meanwhile, many other jobs disappeared 
<https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article181906421.html> 
and have not come back.

Sierra Brava lies low along the south side of PR Route 3 in the shadow 
of Salinas City Hall. Go for a walk through its now largely silent 
streets, and one residence in particular will catch your eye. On a 
corner along Calle Abraham Peña, the neighborhood’s four-block-long main 
avenue, stands a small grey house trimmed in bright blue and topped by a 
blue plastic tarp. It is in even worse shape than some of the abandoned 
houses. But Wilma Miranda Ramos still calls it home.

The hurricane shifted Wilma’s ramshackle little box 
<https://pritigcox.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/living-here-and-not-in-the-street-is-worth-gold/> 
on its foundation, separating the front and rear halves and giving it a 
distinct sideways tilt. Thanks to waters that flooded down the nearby 
Río Nigua from the mountains on the day of the storm, the floors now 
undulate wildly and give underfoot. Large portions of the ceiling are 
gone, and blue light streams in through the tarp above. Water pours in 
with every rainfall.

Wilma explained that she’d been living there six years, but because the 
house was not hers, she could get no help with repairs. “Now I have a 
stitched-together roof,” she said, “but as I have nowhere to go I’m 
still here. Staying here in these conditions is not easy. But since I 
have my daughter and grandson of four years here with me, living here 
and not in the street is worth gold.”

Certain now that no federal help will be coming, Wilma said, “I hope my 
guardian angel arrives soon.”

In the summer of Maria, the region around Salinas had an unemployment 
rate that hovered between 15 and 20 
<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/metro_11062018.pdf&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjT4peBjufgAhVLnq0KHdpMAFYQFggcMAk&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=013738036195919377644:6ih0hfrgl50&usg=AOvVaw3ygzUY1Z8cFWCwWuovn6jh> 
percent and a poverty rate of 54% 
<https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/salinasmunicipiopuertorico/EDU685217>. 
The median household income in Salinas was a little over $16,000 
<https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/salinasmunicipiopuertorico/EDU685217>. 
The city was in economic decline, rendering it deeply vulnerable to 
devastation by any hurricane, and the monstrous Maria was not just any 
hurricane.

More than a century of U.S. colonial rule, culminating in a harsh 
federal plan to deal with the island’s debt to vulture capitalists, 
guaranteed that Maria’s destructive force would be multiplied by 
socioeconomic vulnerability. To make matters worse, federal disaster 
assistance to Puerto Ricans after Maria was much smaller 
<https://gh.bmj.com/content/bmjgh/4/1/e001191.full.pdf> and was doled 
out much more slowly than the assistance that went to Texas and Florida 
after hurricanes Harvey and Irma that same season.

Across Puerto Rico, according to the /New York Times/, the Federal 
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was responsible for awarding 
home-repair grants, rejected 58 percent 
<https://www.wral.com/fema-set-aside-billions-to-repair-homes-in-puerto-rico-many-are-still-in-ruins-/17861262/> 
of applications. When they did provide funds, the amount was often 
inadequate to restore a severely damaged house; the median grant was 
only $1,800, compared with about $9,127 in Texas after Harvey.

In Sierra Brava, only a lucky few managed to wrangle any 
home-restoration money out of FEMA. Roofs and the spaces where roofs 
used to be remain covered in blue tarp. The tap water is foul and 
undrinkable. Electricity was restored about four months after Maria, but 
with rates two to three times the cost of power on the mainland, people 
are falling farther and farther behind on their bills; as a result they 
now risk 
<https://www.telemundopr.com/noticias/destacados/Comenzaran-a-suspender-el-servicio-de-AEE-2-506608061.html> 
seeing their lights go out again, this time shut off by the power company.

Many houses in the neighborhood have been handed down within the same 
family for several generations, some going all the way back to Spanish 
rule. And that became many residents’ biggest problem. For almost a year 
after the storm, FEMA was approving repair funds only for those who 
could show proof of ownership, and many did not have sufficient 
documentation.

FEMA finally started accepting affidavits 
<https://www.law360.com/articles/1123340> as proof of ownership last 
August but did not ensure that previously rejected homeowners were 
informed of the policy change. Anyway, by then, many had abandoned their 
ruined houses and moved away for good.

*“It has just stayed the same way”*

On a dead-end side street near Wilma’s home, another woman called us 
over to have a look at her house, a more substantial concrete structure 
with a vivid orange paint job and no roof. Throughout, jagged pieces of 
blue fabric hung from strands of rope above, as if in some ill-conceived 
art installation. The house was empty except for a stove and a 
refrigerator, and a couple of ruined mattresses.

The woman, Socorro Rolon, pointed to the shredded tarp 
<https://pritigcox.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/maria-maria-nos-destruyo-maria/>. 
“This was given to me by the church, and I had to go look for some poles 
to hold it up, and me and a guy from the church put everything like 
this.” The tarp didn’t last long. “Everything got wet. My husband and I 
slept there on those old mattresses over there, and everything was wet, 
nothing could be saved.”

Socorro and her husband had taken refuge in Salinas’ emergency shelter 
during the hurricane. “When we returned from the shelter,” she said, “we 
found total destruction. So we went back to the shelter, but since my 
husband has had a stroke, we had to return to the house even though it 
was destroyed. We did what we could. The hurricane destroyed half the 
world over here. It took the street, and didn’t spare anyone.”

Maria survivors who received home-restoration money from FEMA could 
apply to a program called Tu Hogar Renace <https://tuhogarrenace.com/> 
(Your Home Reborn), which sent crews to do repairs. Socorro and her 
husband received some FEMA money; she didn’t say how much. “So,” she 
said, “we signed up with Renace, and they came four times to check the 
house. I have a letter they sent, and it said the house couldn’t be 
fixed,” at least not for the amount of money they had. “It stayed like 
this, and we lived in it.” When life in a roofless house finally became 
unbearable, they rented a room in a neighbor’s house.

Tu Hogar Renace has received almost four thousand 
<https://www.elnuevodia.com/english/english/nota/tuhogarrenaceprogramtobeaudited-2426710/> 
complaints about the quality or incompleteness of their work, and the 
Puerto Rican government has launched an investigation. But that won’t 
get Socorro out of her predicament. “So,” she said, “we have the house 
and a check that FEMA gave us, but they didn’t help anymore afterwards, 
and what we get from Social Security isn’t much. I get about $200 and he 
gets about $300 or so.”

Where they once lived for free in their own house, now, she said, “we 
are paying to live where we are because we cannot live on the street.”

In seeking help for home restoration, residents faced several obstacles. 
The closest FEMA office taking applications was in the city of Guayama, 
a half-hour drive east of Salinas. For car-less residents whose friends 
and neighbors had fled—and given the lack of a good public 
transportation system—that office might as well have been in Washington, 
DC. Those who could get themselves to Guayama found that application 
forms were in English, but at least the people in the office spoke Spanish.

Those calling the FEMA help line found non-Spanish-speaking employees on 
the other end. Residents could also apply online, but for four months 
after the hurricane, Sierra Brava had no electricity. Even if they got 
access to the Internet, senior citizens who had no family members nearby 
to help them were often stymied by the FEMA website. And for those who 
did get their applications submitted, the inspectors who came to check 
out their houses spoke only English; the documents they had to sign to 
receive compensation were also in English.

*Waiting for FEMA . . .*

Madeleine Flores Tenazoa, 30, had volunteered to be our guide and 
translator in Salinas. She is a kind of unofficial community organizer, 
deeply rooted in Sierra Brava. She showed us her grandmother’s house, 
which had been in her family for many decades. FEMA provided a paltry 
$400 to repair the home’s severely damaged roof and nothing to replace 
the contents of its flooded-out rooms.

Madeleine told us, “When they came, they asked, ‘Where is the furniture 
you lost? My grandma said it was all ruined, so it got hauled away. They 
said, ‘Well then we aren’t going to give you nothing, since we can’t see 
what you lost.’”

Her grandmother wasn’t the only one to have this problem, and word got 
around. In and around Salinas, we saw big curbside piles of ruined 
furniture and appliances, one bearing a hand-painted sign reading “No 
toque” (“Don’t touch”). Madeleine said that if city workers come now to 
remove the debris, “Those people say, ‘No, no, no! We are waiting for 
FEMA. They need to see what we lost!’ But come on, it’s been a year and 
a half. FEMA’s not coming.”

About a mile south of Sierra Brava is Playa de Salinas, the seafront 
area that Maria hit even harder than the central city. Riding through 
the area with Madeleine, we noticed an elderly woman sitting on a stack 
of concrete blocks in the dirt outside a small half-built house. She had 
a push broom with her and was shelling gandules—beans she’d plucked from 
the large bushes that grew nearby.

The woman, Fela Suren, called us over. She said she was “eighty 
something” years old. The house was being built for her by a local 
church, but the work was on pause until she or they could get more money 
together. Next to the unfinished house stood her longtime home, minus 
its roof and a couple of walls. It was clear that before Maria, it had 
been a larger, more attractive house than her new concrete-block one was 
going to be.

Most of Fela’s furniture and appliances sat exposed 
<https://pritigcox.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/message-from-madeline-to-donald-you-are-bullying-the-people/> 
to the Caribbean sun and rain. A small, new section of roof covered only 
the kitchen area, which was now serving as Fela’s bedroom. The room was 
now open to the outdoors on one side. Her bed had big hardwood head- and 
foot-boards and was draped with  mosquito netting. Out back, her well’s 
hand pump still produced water, but it was a milky yellow color.

Fela said she has no family in Salinas, but she has good neighbors. One 
of them cooks meals for her and brings her water to drink. She spends 
her days tidying up in and around her ruined house and the construction 
site. As Fela spoke, she was all smiles. At eighty-something, she seemed 
to be leaving the past in the past and looking to the future. But in 
that future, she declared, “I never want to see anything like that 
hurricane again.”

The story of recovery from a devastating hurricane like Maria will 
always be a long and painful one—but it has to begin somewhere. For many 
residents of Puerto Rico, that story still hasn’t started. Until 
something changes, their story is one of survival, not recovery. It 
isn’t a nice one, but they want every one of us to hear it.

As Madeleine urged in a parting comment, “People need to come here and 
see how we are trying to live.”

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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