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A third died a mile or two away, apparently of a heart attack, in his bathtub.Īfter the Storm: Puerto Rico's Morgues Are Overflowing A second man drowned on the far side of the river. A police officer would find him the next morning, his body pinned against a chain-link fence.
Near the center of town, a man who lived alone went outside to buy cigarettes, and the silt-colored water swept him off his feet. Trapped on the second stories of inundated homes, residents watched as torrents of water formed rapids above cars and the tops of trees. Closer to San Juan, the rains poured through the open gates of the La Plata Dam, swelling the La Plata River and overflowing the canals around the lowland pastures and cane fields of the municipality of Toa Baja. In Aguada, the swollen Culebrinas River drowned two police officers.
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The deluge cracked the spillway beneath the Guajataca Dam, near the western end of the island, prompting the government to order the evacuation of 70,000 people who lived downstream. Six months’ worth of rain fell in less than four days. So would the computers, all but one of the elevators, most of the overhead lighting, and many of the electrical outlets. The chillers on the air-conditioning system would go dark.
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One generator would be enough for only the most essential, critical systems.
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Two generators were enough to power the building, but each would need to be taken offline regularly for maintenance. The crew threw a switch and took it offline. This was one of three generators, each the size of a station wagon, designed as a backup system for temporary blackouts. Outside, the wind had pulled a tree up from the concrete sidewalk and thrown it across the roof of the boiler room, where it smashed the exhaust vent of a Caterpillar 3512 diesel generator. Around that time, the engineers in charge of the emergency room’s electric plant heard a crash. Bodies began to pile up beyond the capacity of the dark and fetid morgues.ĭuring those first hours at Centro Médico, Puerto Rico’s largest, most sophisticated hospital, Maria tore off part of the roof and flooded the neonatal-intensive-care unit, forcing the evacuation of newborns to another floor. But the scope of what had happened began to reveal itself soon enough. For the next few hours, the highest levels of the Puerto Rican government were paralyzed as officials struggled to obtain accurate information.
At the headquarters of the bankrupt electric utility, the backup generator stopped working, as did the computer server, cutting off the chief executive from his own records. The island’s electrical grid and mobile-phone networks went down. The death toll began immediately: In the town of Utuado, a landslide came through the wall of a house where three elderly sisters had taken refuge, burying them alive. Sheets of earth fell from the hillsides, smashing houses and erasing roads. The wind tore hundreds of electrical-transmission towers from the ground and carried some of them through the air. It rolled at the leisurely pace of about ten miles an hour and hovered above the island’s mountainous center well into the morning. The storm’s center was 50 to 60 miles across - more than half the length of the island. Wind gusts peaked at 155 miles an hour, bending palm trees like straws and snapping others off near the roots. It arrived shortly after six in the morning, near the harbor at Yabucoa. Rodríguez highlighted the combination of strong afternoon thunderstorms, typical for the area during the summer months, and the heavy sea breeze, along with the region’s topography, as potential factors contributing to the formation of the small tornado.Įxperts from the US National Weather Service traveled to Aguada on Monday to assess the tornado’s classification.On Wednesday, September 20, the eye of Hurricane Maria cut a slash directly across the island of Puerto Rico, from the southeast to the northwest. This destructive tornado caused roof damage and brought down numerous trees and power lines. The most powerful tornado in recent decades struck the town of Arecibo in May 2022, with wind speeds ranging from 86 mph to 110 mph. However, the majority of these tornadoes have had minimal impact, as confirmed by Emanuel Rodríguez González, a meteorologist from the US National Weather Service.
According to the US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s database, a total of 24 tornadoes have been recorded in Puerto Rico since 1950, including the one that occurred on Sunday.
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