327- A Year in the Dark

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.8 • 27.5K Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2018

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The almost year-long struggle to get power working on the island and the utility worker who became a Puerto Rican folk hero.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is 99% invisible. I'm Katie Mingle filling in for Roman Mars.
0:07.2	In the early morning of September 20th, 2017, a category for Hurricane hit the island of Puerto Rico.
0:15.6	Hurricane Maria slamming into the island and as you heard, one official saying the island
0:20.4	is destroyed. The first category for storm destroyed Puerto Rico in 85 years.
0:25.1	Power lines are down, streets are impassable, many roads are flooded.
0:31.5	Maria was a beast of a hurricane. The strongest one to hit the island since 1932.
0:37.7	The wind was blowing 155 miles an hour, which is very close to being a category five.
0:45.5	And it didn't just hit one stretch of the coast. It actually moved across the whole island,
0:52.0	ripping up everything in its path. You know, brush everywhere, trees down, power lines down,
0:58.8	obviously everywhere, you know, the entire island in the dark. That's Danielle Ellercone.
1:04.9	He spent some time reporting in Puerto Rico after the storm and wrote an article about it for
1:10.1	wired magazine. The next morning people wake up, they go out of their houses, their apartments,
1:15.9	they look out on the streets to survey the damage and start trying to make sense of what they're
1:22.5	seeing in front of them, you know. And one of the people out there that day, driving around
1:30.5	in a state of utter shock, was a guy named Jorge Brasero.
1:35.1	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, God, please, God, please.
1:42.7	That's from a video that Jorge took the day after the storm. He's from the capital city of San
1:48.0	Juan, and he told me he was just totally caught off guard by how bad this storm was.
1:53.6	It really became obviously known for everybody around that we were in deep trouble.
1:59.2	But it wasn't for a few days when Jorge actually made it into work that he fully grasped the scale of the crisis.
2:06.2	He works at Prepo, which stands for Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. It's the public utility that provides electricity for nearly the entire island.
2:15.2	I actually arrive at the power plant. I noticed that I was one of the few that actually made it because most people live inland.
	...

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