Puerto Ricans are burrowed inside shelters, cement bunkers, and boarded-up houses as Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm still gathering strength, whirls toward the US territory.
“We have not experienced an event of this magnitude in our modern history,” Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said Tuesday ahead of the storm, warning residents that their island will most likely sustain monumental damage. About 500 shelters are set up around the island and, as of 8 p.m. more than 4,400 people, and 100 pets, are tucked inside.
“It’s the biggest and potentially most catastrophic hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in a century,” Rosselló said, explaining that the island could receive up to 25 inches of rain, as well as violent winds and storm surges, producing potentially life-threatening flooding and mudslides.
After Irma grazed Puerto Rico’s northeast coast, about a million people were in the dark for days and large swaths of the territory are still not back online. Now with Maria poised to land right on top of the island, Rosello told NPR he expects the island’s fragile energy system to collapse completely.
In the wake of Hurricane Irma, Puerto Rico had become an evacuation destination and vital resource center for the US Virgin Islands, which is struggling with major devastation after the storm hit about two weeks ago.
Thousands of people in both territories are still without power, homeless, and hungry, and uncleared debris and wreckage are strewn across neighborhoods and roadways, which will become dangerous projectiles when hit by Maria, which is clocking winds up to 175 mph.
David Samuels, who helped evacuate several friends from St. John five days after Irma hit, told BuzzFeed News Monday night that the friends are hunkering down in a cement bunker in Puerto Rico surrounded by homemade sandbags.
“We’re in denial this is happening,” Samuels, 41, said. “I’m still homeless. A lot of people took down boards from their homes and had to go and put them back up again.”
Although residents had more time to prepare and stock up on food and water this time around, Samuels described a chaotic and frenzied scene as people lined up to get packaged food, gas for generators, and tarps for their already gaping homes.
“It was rough, yeah, but it was getting better. We were coming out of it,” he said. “But Wednesday, we’re going to get our asses kicked.”
—Brianna Sacks
