Hurricane Georges and the country side of Puerto Rico
By: Joshua Benitez
It was very calm
the morning of September 21, 1998. All
televisions in the house were set on the news: Hurricane Georges, a
category 3
storm was expected to make landfall later that day somewhere in the
south part
of the Island. At
11:00am, the government cut water supply. About
40 minutes later, we had no power either,
even though there were no winds yet. As
the day went by and the sky grew darker, we finished all preparations
and
headed to the balcony to have a first hand view of what was about to
happen,
since it was not supposed to be such a hard hit for the eastern shore. Around 5:00pm winds were getting stronger and
stronger. I was looking at my neighbor’s
roof two houses down the street when a big chunk of the roof was blown
to where
I was. I panicked and was unable to move
as I helplessly watched it bounce off my house roof on to the next door
neighbor’s roof and back to my yard. I
immediately went back inside, closed the door and realized the
hurricane was
not going to the south as the forecast predicted, but it was making
landfall on
the east coast, right where I lived. Around
7:00pm, the relative calm of the eye arrived. My
family and I took the chance to go
outside, against all expert recommendations, to check on damages. We knew we had about 15 to 20 minutes before
winds started furiously blowing again, so we timed ourselves. Not much had happened by then, especially
because
most of the houses in my neighborhood are built with cement, as is
customary in Puerto Rico. But
we knew the worst of the storm was yet to
come. We headed back into the house and
eventually fell asleep to the howling noises of the wind.
The next day, we
went outside to check on the damages. Power
lines were down, trees were down, my
neighbor’s banana crops were completely destroyed and roads were
flooded or
blocked by debris. It was obvious that
recovering from this hurricane was going to take some time. San
Juan, the capital city was fully operational
within
two weeks. However, my hometown,
Naguabo, would take much longer. School
did not resume until after about a week and even then, there was no
running
water. It took over two weeks to get
water and power back to the school. In
my neighborhood, the story was different. After
a month, we finally got running water, but we still
had to wait to
get power. After two months, workers of
the
Georgia Power Company were shipped to the Island
and they were the ones that got power back to my neighborhood.
Hurricane Georges
traversed the island
of Puerto Rico
from east to west in an oscillating motion, at times over the Central
Mountain
Range, and at other times to the south of the mountains. The diameter
of the
eye was about 20-25 miles, which virtually covered the entire width of
the Island, about 37 miles, with its
oscillating motion. The breadth of the
hurricane with estimated
maximum sustained winds of 115 mph, gusts of 150 mph and about 30
inches of
rain stunned us all. Georges's deluge of rainfall caused significant
damage to the agricultural industry, including the loss of 75% of its
coffee
crop, 95% of its banana or plantain crop, and 65% of its live poultry. In all, Hurricane Georges caused
$1.9 billion in damage, but there were no reported casualties. There were, however, at least five casualties
in the aftermath of the hurricane by either CO poisoning from power
generators
or fires caused by unattended candles. It
has been ten years since Hurricane Georges, and I can
only hope that
the Puerto Rican government learned from it so when the next big
hurricane
hits, recovery will not take as long.
Further
information:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/sju/public_report.html
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/huricane/1998/wgpuerto.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00055476.htm