By Gloria Ruiz Kuilan
At the start of the new hurricane season today, several mayors agreed that Puerto Rico is not ready to face a new emergency, as they are still facing obstacles with the felling of trees to prevent the electrical system from collapsing, with the repair of roads and bridges and the placement of generators in pumping stations to avoid lack of water.
The municipal executives consulted by El Nuevo Día agreed that the island had not learned the lessons left behind by Hurricane María almost six years ago, and that the situation worsened for those municipalities in fiscal straits, which invested what little they had in dealing with the emergency that caused by Hurricane Fiona, in September of last year, and have yet to receive reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
“Of course we are not ready. I’ve always said that. I said it last year. How is a municipality going to say that it is prepared if it is still struggling with the recovery of María? From Maria! I’m not talking about Fiona. Fiona we can wait three more years (for recovery), but we still haven’t recovered from Maria. And are we going to be prepared for the hurricane season?” said the mayor of Yabucoa, Rafael “Rafy” Surillo Ruiz.
“The biggest lesson we learned from María is that we don’t have anyone, other than the resources that we have. If someone comes from outside, amen. Glory to God”, released the mayor, whose municipality still has 10 to 15 bridges that were undermined by Hurricane María and only made temporary repairs, and there are roads that had landslides and are in the same condition.
Despite the request, the Department of Transportation and Public Works (DTOP) did not provide information on the roads and bridges fixed after María and how many remain to be addressed.
The mayor of Orocovis, Jesús Colón Berlingeri, indicated that each municipality prepares, in coordination with the central government, particularly because work and emergency plans have to be drawn up. But he recognized that, from theory to practice, there is a stretch.
By way of example, he indicated that they are still not clear about the link and how the communication will be with LUMA Energy, in charge of the transmission and distribution of the electrical network, a problem they faced immediately after Hurricane Fiona, when the system was already It was under the management of the consortium.
“We are not clear about what will happen with the LUMA interaction. There has been no formal communication from LUMA with us, and we have told (the Bureau of) Emergency Management, at the state level ‘provoke a plan, a meeting, an interaction, a real agreement,’ but nothing has happened.” said the mayor.
Yesterday, at the close of this edition, there was no response from the Bureau for Emergency Management and Disaster Administration (NEMBA).
LUMA ensures that it is prepared
Despite the remarks made by the Orocoveño executive, engineer Juan Rodríguez, vice president of Capital Projects at LUMA, said that they have 30 key account representatives, and 13 of them are in charge of the municipalities. “We are fully prepared, to the point that we have over $167 million in material inventory for the new hurricane season,” the executive commented.
Regarding the unhooking work, he argued that they have cleared more than 1,400 miles throughout Puerto Rico over the past two years. He did not detail how much personnel and budget the company has allocated for these works, but acknowledged that, in part, they are done with FEMA funds.
“LUMA is not investing a single cent other than what it bills. The changes of lighting and rotten posts already started partially. Coamo’s turn is April 2024, LUMA informed me. From here to there, they are going to try to change what they can”, indicated the mayor of Coaman, Juan Carlos García Padilla.
When asked what guarantees he gave that he will not go through the same experience as Fiona, when 99% of the electrical service was restored in 22 days, the LUMA spokesperson replied: “We are ready to face the hurricane season. I cannot predict the future, but we are convinced that the system is more robust. The system is stronger. The improvements we have made translate into that.”
But mayors are skeptical of those claims.
“The system is so fragile that any wind that moves a branch and touches a cable, we lose power. It is happening not only with storms. Every time there are winds, we run out of light, and I know of many towns that are left without light,” warned the mayoress of Loíza, Julia Nazario.
“We have dealt with unhooking all year. We have forgotten that LUMA exists because they go with a small machete to cut vegetation. We go deeper, especially with the bamboos. They are pruning, but they are not coping, and we -with our team- eliminate that constant vegetation”, said, for his part, the mayor of San Lorenzo, Jaime Alverio.
His counterpart in San Sebastián, Javier Jiménez, said, instead, that LUMA has done the rigorous work there, but warned that he does not let his guard down. “Municipalities have to be prepared. The municipalities cannot be aware that if Aqueducts, LUMA, have or do not have.”, sentenced the mayor Pepiniano.
And it is that the other concern of the mayors concerns the lack of generators in the pumping stations which, in case there is no electricity, prevents them from providing the drinking water service to subscribers or causes used water to overflow.
“We have the cockfight (station) that does not have a generator, Parcelas Vieques and the PR-187 arriving at the El Cabo urbanization. These are the same ones that did not have generators for María. Still. No work was done to mitigate it”, highlighted Nazario.
“These are the sanitary pumps, the consequence of which is that the communities are flooded with used water when the power goes out,” added the mayoress of Loíza.
The mayor of Comerío, José “Josian” Santiago, stressed that, in that town, “all the communities depend on the pumping stations because they are in a high area.” “That led us to, after María, we were without electricity for six months.”
The mayor of Barranquitas, Elliot Colón, estimates that, of the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (AAA) facilities in that municipality, “more than 50% do not have a generator.”
“And the thing that worries me the most is an exercise that happened on Fiona. The most important plant, which is the Las Bocas plant, LUMA has to have as a priority because in Fiona it was one of the last to turn on and that plant supplies 80% of Barranquitas,” he said.
The mayor of Manatí, José Sánchez, said in separate interviews that the ideal thing is for these generators to be already installed where they are necessary to avoid “taking and putting” and waiting while there are citizens without water.
“Because we are having problems that are not necessarily with a hurricane, but something that has happened recently. A substation in Manatí burned down and we had two to three days without electricity. In addition to being without electricity, the pumps went off and we had no generators. Now, they are repairing that substation from time to time, but every time LUMA says ‘we will be there tomorrow’, the power goes out,” explained Sánchez.
Arnaldo Jiménez Acevedo, PRASA’s Vice President of Planning and Strategy, told El Nuevo Día that the public corporation is ready for the new hurricane season.
However, he specified that they have 1,259 of their own generators, which represents practically the same number that PRASA had last year.
“But we already carried out a process for the acquisition of mobile generators that we can move from facility to facility. We are talking about 59 additional generators, ”he explained.
“And right now we are running a reservation process, which we run every year in preparation for the hurricane season, that the position in which the Authority would be is with 1,618 in the face of the hurricane season. It means that our starting point for this year is basically the same as we had for Hurricane Fiona. We are ready to receive any atmospheric system with that similarity”, he added.
The official specified that PRASA has around 4,000 facilities throughout the island and of that number, 2,200 require power to operate.
However, he clarified that the public corporation cannot place a plant in each of these facilities because some “are on the edge of the roads.”
He classified the dams as “critical facilities”, but did not specify how many have their own generator.
In writing, the PRASA reported that “between filter plants, sewage plants, and dams, they have 221 installations with generators and 29 without a generator. It is important to note that these 29 facilities are included in the rental of generators for the hurricane season”.
Jiménez Acevedo highlighted that several auctions are underway to acquire 165 generators that “should arrive sometime next year.”
In addition, he maintained that FEMA would contribute 420 additional generators.
Asked why, six years after Hurricane María, these acquisitions have not been finalized, the official replied “it is part of the processes carried out with FEMA.”
But the possibility that there is no drinking water in their towns is not the only concern of the municipal executives.
“The big, big, big concern is that we spent all our resources to take on Fiona, about $2.1 million. It was a reserve and we spent it and we had to draw from other funds because 40 inches of rain fell in San Lorenzo, there were major landslides on municipal and state highways,” Alverio commented.
He added that municipalities like his, which have a deficit and spent what little they had in the emergency that Fiona represented, will not have a way to band together now.
FEMA indicated in writing that “almost nine months after Hurricane Fiona, it has approved around $811 million in federal funds for the recovery of Puerto Rico.”
Trujillo Alto is one of 21 municipalities to which FEMA has not yet reimbursed the expenses for works of emergency under the Public Assistance Program in category A and B that includes debris removal, according to information from the Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience (COR3).
While in permanent works, only $2,944,852 of $14,015,762 of the total cost for all projects has been disbursed to the municipalities.
“Of all the issues, this is the most serious because it is not in the hands of any of us. We can work on the rest (problems)”, commented Alverio.
While the mayors of Comerío and Barranquitas also denounced the main shelters that have faced problems at the time of the emergency caused by Fiona and need improvements. At the moment, they said, the obstacles with both shelters persist.
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