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NY Times, Oct. 13 2017
Finding Water in Puerto Rico: An Endless Game of Cat and Mouse
By CAITLIN DICKERSON
SAN JUAN, P.R. — After a day spent working in an office in the dark,
without air-conditioning, Iris Díaz arrived at her neighborhood CVS
drugstore desperate for what has quickly become one of the most
sought-after items in Puerto Rico: bottled water.
A sales clerk standing behind the checkout counter explained that the
store had been out of stock for three days.
“Ni una sola botellita?” Ms. Díaz pleaded in Spanish. “Not even one
little bottle?”
The employee shook her head and apologized.
Three weeks after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, the
challenge of finding enough water to drink and cook with remains
enormous across the island, even in its largest city. People here engage
in a perpetual game of cat and mouse, scouring the city for any hints of
places with water to sell.
People are so desperate that on Wednesday the Environmental Protection
Agency cited reports of residents trying to obtain drinking water from
wells at hazardous Superfund sites. “E.P.A. advises against tampering
with sealed and locked wells or drinking from these wells, as it may be
dangerous to people’s health,’’ the agency said.
The demand has skyrocketed, according to grocery store managers,
distributors and supply companies, because safe, drinkable tap water is
still largely unavailable, and deliveries of water from the outside have
not kept up with demand. Even Puerto Ricans who have been told that
their local water is safe to drink are avoiding it because of reports
that infectious diseases are spreading on the island.
The sight of water delivery trucks outside stores is prompting long
lines to form. Crushes of customers snatch up new shipments even before
store employees can restock empty shelves. Of 10 stores in San Juan that
were visited on Tuesday and Wednesday, only one had bottled water: a
Walmart store where two brawny men were loading cases of water directly
off a shipping pallet into the shopping carts of people who had lined up
in the back of the store. Signs posted on the walls declared a limit of
one case per group.
Phillip Keene, director of corporate communications for Walmart, said
that during the storm, the company had safeguarded pallets of water on
cargo ships that were sent out to sea and away from Maria’s path. Since
then, the company has been delivering about six million bottles of water
a week to Puerto Rico from the continental United States, and it is
making plans to double the supply as soon as possible. Mr. Keene added
that before the storm, Walmart stores in Puerto Rico generally sold
about 300,000 cases of water a week, almost all of it bottled from
sources on the island.
“It’s pretty amazing,” he said. “There’s a real sense of urgency.”
Some Puerto Ricans, particularly those in rural areas, are relying
entirely on water provided as emergency aid by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency. The water is sent to local distribution centers, and
then delivered door to door by local governments.
Federal officials said that as of Wednesday, more than six million
liters of water had arrived on the island, but that damaged ports, roads
and bridges had slowed the deliveries, especially to the interior of the
commonwealth. Officials say 75 percent of the island’s ports are open,
and they are receiving about 1,100 containers of supplies a day, close
to the 1,400 that came in daily before the storm.
The lack of water is far worse than anything experienced in Florida and
Texas after Hurricanes Irma and Harvey. Relief experts say that because
of the extent of damage to Puerto Rico’s water systems, the scale of the
overall destruction and the difficulty of delivering aid to an island
rather than on the mainland, it did not make sense to compare the
response in Puerto Rico with Florida or Texas in terms of efficiency or
focus.
“What happened in Texas and Florida were disasters,” said W. Craig
Fugate, who was FEMA administrator under President Barack Obama. “What
happened in Puerto Rico was a catastrophe.”
Before Maria hit, most of the bottled water consumed in Puerto Rico was
produced in factories on the island, according to Manuel Reyes Alfonso,
executive vice president of the Puerto Rico Chamber for the Marketing
and Distribution of the Food Industry, a trade association of grocery
manufacturers, distributors and store owners. Most of those facilities
lost power during the storm and are now operating on generators, which
allow them to produce only a small fraction of their normal output.
The island was already running low on bottled water before the storm,
because it was exporting a lot to places that had been damaged by
Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, Mr. Reyes Alfonso said.
The Puerto Rican government said it had taken steps to make more water
accessible, like allowing the two largest dairy companies, Suiza Dairy
and Tres Monjitas, to bottle potable water in milk containers.
In the CVS where Ms. Diaz was shopping, Carmen Santiago, a 74-year-old
retired English professor wearing a plaid shirt and cargo pants, said
she had given up on finding water in stores. She said she was surviving
on a single bottle a day, which was all the hospital in her neighborhood
would sell to each person who came to buy water — for $1.25 each.
She was at CVS in search of boxes of orange juice, an alternative to
water that would be light enough for her to carry back to her apartment
on foot. She found none on the shelves, but a store employee who saw her
searching disappeared into a stock room and returned with news that a
shipment had just arrived. Ms. Santiago jumped up and down, and her eyes
became teary.
In a store in the Hato Rey neighborhood called Plaza Louiza, which was
open despite having no electricity, shoppers caromed around in the dark
on Tuesday, looking for essentials and seeming to ignore the smell of
rotting food.
Down an aisle of dry goods, Maritza Pérez used the light from her
cellphone to illuminate the prices of ramen noodles and rice. She had
come looking for water, but the store had none available. It was her
fifth unsuccessful try of the day.
Her home was still without electricity or water. She, her husband and
their 12-year-old son were growing impatient with having to drink a kind
of storm tea — boiled tap water, which she said had turned a yellowish
hue after the storm.
“Water is the most important thing — more important than light,” she
huffed, sounding exhausted.
At the front of the store, two deliverymen from grocery-supply companies
were sitting on the floor, scanning their lists of orders. They were
trying to call the clients they planned to visit next, but were mostly
unsuccessful, because cellphone service in the area is still very limited.
Elvin Cortes, one of the deliverymen, said that he had been perpetually
out of water since the storm hit. His deliveries took longer than normal
because many roads were still impassable. On top of that, he said, much
of the island is suffering from crippling traffic jams because most
traffic lights are still out, turning major intersections into chaotic
and dangerous four-way stops.
“It’s impossible for us to do our jobs,” he said. “And it’s not getting
any better.”
Follow Caitlin Dickerson on Twitter @itscaitlinhd.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting from San Juan and Ron Nixon
from Washington.
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