San Juan’s largest airport, Luis Muñoz Marín International, opened two days after Maria on September 22 using backup power. Controllers operated under see and be seen rules because radar systems were out. Pilots arrived and departed the airport by watching for each other’s planes and staying out of each other’s way.
San Juan’s executive airport also reopened, handling a steady flow of arrivals and departures. Gonzalo Ferrer noticed something different about the air traffic.
“We were getting gas for our cars, with a 10 gallon limit, at a marina near San Juan’s private airport,” Mr. Ferrer said. “The numbers and kinds of planes taking off were incredible. Not single-engine planes either: these were turbine-powered, like Challengers, Falcons, King Airs, all kinds of fancy private planes.”
One of those jets could have belonged to Tampa cardiologist Kiran Patel. He dispatched his plane carrying over 6,000 pounds of supplies. Dr. Patel’s story, told by the Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin, echoes reports of aircraft owners working with individuals and groups to fly relief supplies directly to the Puerto Rican people.
After Maria, the Puerto Rico campus of Fort Lauderdale-based Nova Southeastern University, with a population of 770, was without power or water. Dr. Patel, one of the university’s donors, heard of the situation and offered a simple solution: use his plane, which stands idle much of the time, to airlift supplies destined for the Nova campus.
“What’s happening in Puerto Rico is not a government problem,” said Dr. Patel. “It’s our problem. It’s society’s problem, and we all have to act.”
The Miami Herald story told of a Miami-based operator of a charter jet fleet. Hired to fly well-heeled customers off the island, the operator decided to send loads of donated water, baby food and other supplies onboard his Lear Jets to San Juan rather than flying them down empty.
Owners of twin-turboprop workhorse aircraft pitched in, too. A member of an informal relief network said these planes flew in with 10,000 pounds of supplies, including much-needed insulin. DHL, FedEx and medical-transport company REVA used their planes for relief missions. Rapper Pitbull sent his private plane to evacuate cancer patients.
The flights operating through San Juan’s international airport included military cargo planes. The frequency of landings alone by this daily parade of heavy-haulers left its mark as Mr. Ferrer would soon see.
“The influx of big cargo jets was impressive,” said Mr. Ferrer, noting the amount of activity at the airports. He flew to the Isla de Vieques after the storm to check on a hotel there owned by a close friend who’s an architect from Toronto.
John Hix, a part-time Vieques resident, designed and owns The Hix Island House. Said Mr. Ferrer, “He came up with a high-end solution for building off the grid, and though Vieques took a hard hit, the hotel’s structures had very little damage and continued to operate.”
The owner-architect deployed Wabi-Sabi philosophies in design and construction of the Hix House. Describing Wabi-Sabi, the hotel’s website says that as things age they become more beautiful. The style is organic and eschews any decoration that is not integral to structure.
Block and reinforced concrete construction surfaced with plaster for the hotel’s building is hurricane resistant, says the website. It can withstand earthquakes and is fireproof.
“Our concrete houses with their steel rolling doors and heavy wood shutters have become havens for our neighbors and friends during hurricanes,” writes Mr. Hix.
Mr. Ferrer’s visit after Maria revealed how the hotel endured another severe hurricane. The damage included downed trees and broken windows on higher floors. On his return flight to San Juan, he noticed the tire marks from all of the heavy cargo jets blackening the width of the airport’s runways.
“Only an impressive amount of aircraft could do this in the short time I was away.”
Mr. Ferrer did not expect building materials to be found among the cargo arriving, but it would have been a welcome discovery for his clients.
His firm, Design + Development, handles architecture and corporate interiors projects for local, stateside and international clients. His staff these days is smaller than when he started in the 90s, due mainly to technology enabling more creativity from fewer people. Of course, nothing much happens without electricity. Once more, a friend offered help.
“For the first few weeks after the storm, a good friend allowed some of my staff to work out of his office within the banking district,” said Mr. Ferrer. “We could do some work even though not much was happening.”
After about six weeks, his office was back to normal. Occasionally the space would lose water access, but his team had a place to work and could address projects. Utilities in the neighborhoods surrounding his office were less than reliable.
“Many areas remained without power so you would have to leave early to go home and start the generator before nightfall and get it fueled up.”
His firm had projects in-house at the time of the storm.
“I had two significant interiors jobs. One was with Gensler where I was the architect of record and doing the CDs for a relocation of about 27,000 square feet. We were able to tackle that and get it done.”
The other was a project for consolidating a group of call centers into an expansion of an existing facility. “We finished the schematic before the storm, and now the client is deliberating whether they are going to go ahead or hold off for some time,” said Mr. Ferrer. “One project was going, and one was put on standby, and that’s good. It could have been different.”
More projects came to the firm after the storm, though few were local.
“I’m doing a café for a client that owns an office building and a project for a friend of mine who lives in Ecuador. It’s a façade for four buildings that were built at different times. We designed a system that unifies them using a screen across the façade from a manufacturer in Columbia. I did the site visit in November, then saw the screen manufacturing plant in Medellín on that same trip.”
Other work involved helping clients whose structures were damaged by the storm.
“I designed a high-end horse stable on a client’s farm outside San Juan that had damage to small areas on two corners of the roof,” he said. “It’s made of slate shingles from Vermont.”
With the island’s shipping system overwhelmed with all of the relief supplies, generators and fleets of utility trucks, getting building materials for jobs of any size has been challenging.
“We always had a six-to-eight week wait for materials because we don’t locally produce any of the construction materials we use,” said Mr. Ferrer. “Now we’re more like eight-to-ten weeks on lead time.”
For interiors work, there is some local warehousing. The suppliers do keep basic items like gypsum board and suspended ceilings, but the lead time is longer once specifiers select a specific item that has to be ordered. Many of Mr. Ferrer’s corporate interior clients have offices in San Juan’s banking district, and most of them were fully operational within a couple of days after the storm.
“On the commercial side, I think most of the buildings were able to withstand the storm very well,” he said. “Some lost windows due to flying debris, but most buildings were back in action fairly fast.”
One of the firm’s clients was less fortunate. Maria damaged their offices to where they required an immediate relocation. Mr. Ferrer, who holds a real estate license, closed a deal for them so they could resume operation. Even for buildings with locomotive-size generators and fuel tanks to match, replenishing their diesel supply was a problem. “They had to limit their hours of operation, but they were back.”
Tim Johnson of McClatchy’s Washington Bureau reported on October 11 that the island’s pharmaceutical plants were operating by the fourth week after the storm, and that Bacardi Rum’s inventories were safe. This news came as many of the island’s smaller businesses remained closed.
Mr. Johnson’s list of those still closed included “mom-and-pop shops, law firms, family-run farms, real estate offices, some hotels, large shopping malls and advertising businesses.”
Shop owners with generators managed to keep their doors open – at a cost. Operating a generator six days a week can consume 90 gallons of diesel fuel at $4.00 per gallon, from Mr. Johnson’s reporting. Many homeowners relied on generators, too. In the days, weeks and months after Hurricane Maria, staying at home meant having a generator for electricity and keeping the generator fueled.
“I sold two diesel tanks to clients,” said Mr. Ferrer. “I sold a 3,000 gallon tank to a real estate client.” That client didn’t have a fuel tank and wanted one on-site. “I was able to source the last big tank that a welding shop was building.”
Fueling a generator was of little concern to those with Maria’s floodwaters standing inside their homes. Mr. Ferrer believes that homes with the most damage inflicted were built informally without architects or serious builders involved.
“Incredibly, there is still a great amount of wood construction outside of the urban centers and even on the outskirts of the metropolitan areas,” said Mr. Ferrer. “These days, flying into San Juan you see a lot of blue tarps where sheet metal roofing used to be.”
Bernardo Márquez García, mayor of Toa Baja, a municipality just west of San Juan, estimated that 9,000 of the city’s 26,000 homes are informally built.
The mayor, who took office in January 2017, said to Politico’s Lorraine Woellert, “We have a big problem. Before Hurricane Maria hit, we didn’t know we had so much informal construction.”
Flooded areas in Toa Baja consisted largely of homes built on land not likely owned by the residents, some calling themselves rescatadores– rescuers of the land. Ms. Woellert wrote that they claim a moral, not legal, right to their homes.
Speaking to the plight of the rescatadores, Mayor García said, “They have been there for 40 to 60 years, for generations. They’ve built a community, they have a social fabric. We can’t move in one, two or three years what’s been there for decades. They’ve been given facilities, utilities.”
Utility connections in Toa Baja or anywhere else on the island post-Maria meant something only if they worked. Drinking water shortages and electricity outages were widespread. Periodic power outages continue to make headlines. Blackouts happen in the States, too, affecting millions. Generally, crews restore power to most areas in hours. What was different about Maria’s effects on Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million citizens?
“Every single customer on the island lost power,” John Farrell wrote in a November 2017 article on greattechmedia.com. Mr. Farrell leads the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance; his article was a primer about the economics of Puerto Rico’s electric utility industry.
It began with an offer of free electricity to municipalities in the 1940s by the last federally appointed governor of Puerto Rico. The offer was electricity at no-charge, up the amount of property taxes lost when private utilities where taken public. What municipalities understood was electricity at no-charge. Mr. Farrell wrote that the accumulated debt to the electric utility from municipalities, schools, hospitals, airports and transit systems equals $720 million. That total is 2016 alone.
The analysis Mr. Farrell reports aligns with those of others looking at Puerto Rico’s situation from the outside. Shut down the island’s antiquated oil-fueled generation, stop the free electricity practice, set rates to recover costs and conduct maintenance. Look to harden the grid and nurture renewable energy systems.
The reasons for moving in that direction were clear before Maria. After Maria, they are imperative.
“Obviously the main problem here was the electrical distribution grid,” said Mr. Ferrer. Just as much of a problem was how to begin correcting the situation.
He explained his understanding of the issue, one leavened with the unity of a people experiencing a common peril. After Maria, everyone waited for the power to come back. Puerto Rico’s public utilities had to establish priorities. These priorities did not necessarily include the rural areas.
“My parents have a farmhouse in a town about an hour’s drive outside San Juan, and they are still without power,” said Mr. Ferrer. “I was there last Saturday, and I don’t see much happening. That’s not a high-density area, and places like that will have to wait longer for power to return.”
It finally did return at the end of April, seven months after Maria.
“I would think they are tackling the urban centers and maybe even full communities in the larger metropolitan areas, then spreading out.”
Gonzalo Ferrer and his family survived the storm, and then the chaos in the storm’s aftermath. Now, they are what he calls “getting back on track.” The architect is emerging from a life-altering experience, living moment to moment, surviving an hour, a day, a week at a time.
“Puerto Rico was prepared for being without power for a couple of days, but certainly not for three to four months.”
How did he make it?
“One has to stay positive, look for opportunities, stay close to family and good friends.”
Amid chaos, Gonzalo Ferrer found the options.