Hurricane Irma and Maria wreaked havoc on the Caribbean and the southern part of the United States last year in September. One island in particular that has massive damage and is still facing the damages of the hurricanes is Puerto Rico. Many students on the Saint Leo campus who hail from Puerto Rico are still struggling knowing the current state of the island in the aftermath of the powerful storms.
One student, Alejandro Maldonado, a freshman majoring in business management, mentioned how he coped with this.
“It obviously affected me; it obviously affected my studies, but I managed to just stay positive,” said Maldonado. “It impacted me because I knew what was happening on the island: people were suffering because there was no food, there was no water, and that really impacted … that made me not eat for a while.”
Another student who commented on how she felt at the time during and immediately following the hurricane was Natalia Figueroa, a junior majoring in english/professional writing. Figueroa mentioned that with Irma there was not as much damage, so she was not as worried. However, with Maria that was when it got “scary for her.” It was difficult for her because she was faced with pictures on her phone during class and with news coverages on the TV on campus about the after effects.
“It was extremely hard just being here and not knowing what was going on back home. It was like suffocating because you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know how people are doing, you don’t know how bad it is,” said Figueroa. “I didn’t know when I was going back home. I didn’t know when I was going to see my family again.”
Like Figueroa mentioned, what made this more difficult was that a lot of students were not sure if they were going home from the break because of the damage that the island faced due to the hurricane. However, a lot of students were, in fact, able to return to Puerto Rico.
“At first, I wasn’t really sure if I was going back during Christmas break, but I ended up going. Once you get out of the airport…for me it was kind of like shocking to see because I wasn’t expecting it to look so empty,” said Figueroa.
She mentioned what it felt like to drive around and see the effects of the hurricane. Many of the trees had fallen, and traffic lights didn’t have power, making it a bit chaotic to drive. However, Figueroa also mentioned that a lot of Puerto Ricans had the spirt that they would get through this and the condition would improve. There were a lot of proudly waving Puerto Rican flags and other indicators that the people had the attitude that “Puerto Rico, we will get through this.”
Figueroa was relieved that the state of the island was better than expected and her parents confirmed that the state of the island did improve drastically. In fact, her parents told her that, right after the hurricane, it resembled an apocalypse.
“My parents were like, ‘yeah, you should have seen it, like, right after the hurricane, it looked like the zombie apocalypse.’ That’s what they kept calling it,” said Figueroa.
Maldonado also described his experience going back home during the Christmas break.
“I was able to go back. Thank God. When I got off the plane, I noticed. When I was even arriving you can see the houses from the plane … you can still see the destruction,” said Maldonado. “On my way home, you can still see trees on the main streets, streets closed, electrical poles on the ground. So, it was like a constant reminder. So, it affected me because it’s not the same seeing it in the videos as being there and experiencing everything that happened.”
Francisco Ortiz Fullana, a freshman majoring in business management, also had a lot to say about the atmosphere of the island when he returned to Puerto Rico for Christmas Break.
“You can feel the environment from just seeing Puerto Rico from above and when you came out of the airplane. It didn’t feel right. The environment was just not the same,” said Fullana.
Maldonado went into depth about what the island lost due to the hurricane.
“We lost a lot of things. It affected the economy, it affected agriculture, and it affected a lot of resources we had,” said Maldonado.
The island was badly damaged in several ways. As a result, a lot of people moved from Puerto Rico to the mainland of the United States. In fact, in roughly two months following the hurricane, 200,000 Puerto Ricans moved to Florida, according to NBC News. Also, according to Reuters, the number increased to approximately 300,000 in 2018.
Maldonado knows of a lot of people who packed up and moved to the mainland.
“They moved to the mainland because they lost their jobs or they lost their house, and at least the mainland was giving a lot of job opportunities to most of the people,” Maldonado stated.
Maldonado also knows of a lot of Puerto Rican students going to the universities in the mainland because the university system in Puerto Rico was plagued with debt, corruption, and strikes, even before the hurricanes hit. The storms merely exacerbated those problems.
Fullana said that some of his friends who went to the universities in the mainland moved to Miami, Atlanta, and Chicago along with their families.
One student who headed to the mainland was Maria Jose Figueroa Miletta, who is a freshman majoring in business management. She attended University of Puerto Rico last semester for her freshman year. However, her semester there was plagued with a lot of difficulties.
“My first semester was in the University of Puerto Rico, but I lost my semester because, beside the hurricane, last semester we had a strike,” said Miletta. “So, the University of Puerto Rico was like three months without any education.”
She said that it was almost as if the semester hadn’t even happened. In fact, her semester was supposed to end in early February. So, after the hurricanes, that was when she decided to transfer to a different college on the mainland. She applied to numerous schools, and she ended up at Saint Leo University. She mentioned that Saint Leo University offered her help while transferring schools.
The hurricanes have had a major effect on Puerto Ricans, especially since the last catastrophic storm to hit the island was in the early 1900s. According to the Chicago Tribune, the San Felipe hurricane hit the island in 1928, resulting in deaths of about 1,000 people in Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican students here on campus weren’t alive when a hurricane had struck the island. Therefore, storms of this magnitude are a new experience for them.
Fullana couldn’t even begin to comprehend how weighty these storms would be.
“Nobody thought that the hurricane would hit so hard because, in a long time, there hasn’t been a hurricane like this,” said Fullana.
Figueroa added that the hurricanes were not anticipated to be this intense and a lot of people didn’t initially take it seriously.
“I never faced a hurricane like that. Every year we had a hurricane coming, we used to get classes canceled, but no one really took it seriously because, at the end, it was just a tropical storm,” said Figueroa. “At first when I heard that a hurricane was coming, I was like it will turn into a tropical storm. But then when I heard people getting scared, that’s when I started to get scared… I just can’t imagine what people went through when they were there. Like hearing stories, it’s just breathtaking.”
Maria was actually on the island when in the midst of the hurricane. She confirmed that a lot of people didn’t take the hurricane too seriously either. She detailed her experience during one of the hurricanes last year.
“The hurricane easily started like at three in the morning. It went 12 hours straight. The first six hours were horrible,” said Miletta. “In my house, I felt more wind and rain. For me, it was horrible actually. It was very terrifying hearing all the wind. All you heard [were]trees falling and how in some other houses doors get knocked out.”
Although her family didn’t suffer that much property damage, a lot of people did. What really stood out to her was that everyone had some anxiety due to strong feelings of uncertainty. In the aftermath, Miletta was left without a constant flow of electricity and water for about a month.
“Every once in a way when the water came, we had to rush to clean our clothes,” said Miletta. “We always had to go to the hardware store to buy gas tanks to cook up food. It was pretty difficult.”
Besides the limited supply of water and electricity that plagued the island after the hurricane, there were major damages to the island, such as food shortages and road destruction. Figueroa related how the hurricane affected not only her family’s personal property but also their business properties.
“For me, my house didn’t suffer a lot of damages. It was, just, for example, a palm tree fell on the entrance, and the garage door was damaged,” said Figueroa. “We have seven stores, and we sell truck parts [and]batteries … basically, the roof of our main store was completely blown away, so we lost a lot of merchandise. And on another store, one of the doors was ripped off. A lot of people entered, and they stole batteries and merchandise, so that was, like, our main damage.”
Also, her family’s farm, which is her favorite place to go, suffered greatly as well. A wooden house-like structure on the property was completely destroyed, and there were a lot of downed trees. For her, “it was hard to recognize.”
Fullana’s family property also faced some flooding and window damages.
“There was not that much damage, but my room and the living room were a bit flooded,” said Fullana. “The pool table was completely destroyed; I think it was in the pool too. Besides from that, there was not much damage.”
He mentioned that the improvement to the property damage has been a slow, but manageable process.
Maldonado’s father and mother are doing good now, however, the hurricane affected his family’s horse farm, initially causing their business to suffer.
“The only worry was when the electricity went off, and there was no water. My dad has a diesel power plant. To get diesel or to get gasoline was a really hard thing in that moment because I know people who had to wait eight hours to get gas in a gas station line. Eight hours, can you imagine that?” said Maldonado. “Without the diesel, there was no electricity, and without electricity, there were no resources. And the horses were with no water for a time, and that was a worry. That was a worry for me and for our family.”
There was a slow process to restore electricity to some parts of the island. In fact, there have been recent reports, including a report from USA Today, that more than 400,000 people are still without power nearly five months after the storms.
Figueroa mentioned that her community was one of the first areas to get electricity. She got power three weeks following the hurricanes, which was fairly quick compared to other areas. Her best friends, who live in close proximity to her, got power Sunday, Jan. 28, more than four months after the storm.
Miletta explained that part of the reason for some areas getting power restored slowly is because of the outdated system.
“In Puerto Rico, we have this system that is really antique,” said Miletta. “They need to update it, and I think that is the main reason why we haven’t gotten back yet… in some parts of Puerto Rico, we still don’t have electricity.”
Maldonado also mentioned that the systems were established nearly 70 or 80 years ago, confirming that these old systems were a major part of the lack of power.
Besides power, there were also problems with cell phone signals, which posed problems for Puerto Ricans who was desperate to get in touch with relatives during and following the hurricanes. Miletta expressed her difficulties of getting in contact with her distant relatives on the island even though she was on the same island.
“We never saw it coming that we never had signal. I couldn’t communicate with some of my relatives after a month being on the same island. I had a signal a month later,” said Miletta.
Similar to Maria, Saint Leo students had difficulty reaching their families who were in Puerto Rico as well.
Figueroa’s dad was in Orlando when the hurricanes hit. However, Natalia’s mother, sister and, grandparents were still on the island following the hurricane, and she faced some difficulty reaching her family after the storms had passed. Since she lives in the metropolitan area, she didn’t lose much communication during the hurricanes. After the towers crashed, she lost communication for only two days with her immediate family members. However, for other distant family members, she lost communication for about two weeks.
It was even more difficult for Maldonado, who had to wait three weeks to make contact with his family.
“I couldn’t talk to my parents right after the hurricane. I had to wait three weeks to communicate with them because I had no signal at all,” said Maldonado. “When I got to talk to them, our house had a bit of water in it; the walls were a little bit damaged, the humidity damaged a few things.”
The winds also caused problems at Maldonado’s home. Fallen trees trapped his family in their home for a few hours.
Fullana also expressed his difficulty with getting in touch with his family. It took three weeks or a month to get in touch with his family.
“The signal in Puerto Rico was completely destroyed; there was no way in getting in touch with someone. If you could get in touch with someone it was with face to face,” said Fullana.
To read more on these student’s perspective on the aid from the governor, Trump’s administration, and even the assistance from different entities at Saint Leo University, look out for the continuation of the article in next week’s print issue
