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SPEAKER_04: This is 99% invisible. I'm Katie Mingle filling in for Roman Mars. In the early morning of September 20th, 2017, a category four hurricane hit the island of Puerto Rico.
SPEAKER_09: Hurricane Maria slamming into the island. And as you heard one official saying the island is destroyed. The first category four storm to strike Puerto Rico in 85 years.
SPEAKER_05: Power lines are down. Streets are impassable. Many roads are flooded.
SPEAKER_04: Maria was a beast of a hurricane, the strongest one to hit the island since 1932. The wind was blowing 155 miles an hour, which is very close to being a category five. And it didn't just hit one stretch of the coast. It actually moved across the whole island, ripping up everything in its path.
SPEAKER_07: You know, brush everywhere, trees down, power lines down, obviously everywhere, you know, the entire island in the dark.
SPEAKER_04: That's Daniel Alarcon. He spent some time reporting in Puerto Rico after the storm and wrote an article about it for Wired magazine.
SPEAKER_07: The next morning, people wake up, they go out of their houses, their apartments, they look out in the streets to survey the damage and start trying to make sense of what they're seeing in front of them, you know.
SPEAKER_04: And one of the people out there that day, driving around in a state of utter shock, was a guy named Jorge Bracero. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_02: Beba. Oh God, please, God, please.
SPEAKER_04: That's from a video that Jorge took the day after the storm. He's from the capital city of San Juan, and he told me he was just totally caught off guard by how bad this storm was.
SPEAKER_12: It really became obviously known for everybody around that we were in deep trouble.
SPEAKER_04: But it wasn't for a few days when Jorge actually made it into work that he fully grasped the scale of the crisis. He works at PREPA, which stands for Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. It's the public utility that provides electricity for nearly the entire island.
SPEAKER_12: I actually arrived at the power plant. I noticed that I was one of the few that actually made it because most people live in like, a power plant.
SPEAKER_04: When he gets there, he makes his way over to this big computer screen that shows the outline of Puerto Rico, and inside of that, a bunch of lines, kind of like a big connect the dots with each line representing a power line.
SPEAKER_12: And every blinking line, it means a down power line. And the whole island was blinking. Every single line was down. Every single line in the island was down. And that had never happened before.
SPEAKER_07: The trajectory of Maria was almost as if it had been designed by an evil genius. The way it cut across the island was such that it essentially struck every major transmission line.
SPEAKER_04: The scale of the destruction to the power grid was hard even for Jorge Bracero to comprehend. And he knew that day that he would spend the next several months helping Puerto Rico recover through his work with PREPA. What he didn't know yet was that thousands of people would come to count on him, specifically him, to help them get through their year in the dark. Jorge Bracero is one of those people who you can tell you're going to like just by seeing a picture of him. He's in his late 30s with short brown hair and a beard, and he just looks like a nice guy. He doesn't know something about his eyes. Daniel Alarcon describes him as delightfully nerdy.
SPEAKER_07: He's a guy who will sit and explain to you how an electrical grid works, you know, like and continue to explain it in minute detail even after it's clear that you like can no longer understand what he's talking about.
SPEAKER_04: Jorge has worked for PREPA for 13 years, and his job there is a grueling one. He's responsible for operating two 15-story tall boilers. These boilers are heated by 20 giant burners that Jorge also looks after. And so he's constantly hiking up and down these stairs that service the different parts of this massively tall equipment.
SPEAKER_12: It's extremely hot. You know, every day you're just smelling of petrol and diesel, and it's extremely exhausting. Sometimes you just hate it.
SPEAKER_04: When Maria hit, Jorge and his wife Charlotte rode out the storm at her family's house. They weren't hurt, but they were surrounded by devastation. And they found out some really sad news. Charlotte's best friend, who was pregnant, had gone into stress-induced early labor the day the storm hit and lost the baby. This was particularly frightening to them because Charlotte was also pregnant.
SPEAKER_12: It was the most tense I've ever been in my life.
SPEAKER_04: What if Charlotte also went into early labor? Or what if the baby was born but couldn't survive the post-Maria world with no electricity and temperatures routinely in the 90s?
SPEAKER_12: Because when you sleep at night, that heat was so unbearable. I'm serious. The amount of heat in the air was so, so brutal that you would think, you know, I'm just going to get naked outside because I can't contain this damn heat. So I'm thinking a newborn can survive this.
SPEAKER_04: Jorge even considered trying to get his wife off the island.
SPEAKER_12: But eight months pregnant, they don't allow you to fly.
SPEAKER_04: After the storm, Jorge and Charlotte bounced from place to place, staying with friends who had generators. At home, Jorge fretted over his wife and the baby who was coming, ready or not, in November. At work, things were even more stressful. The first priority was to get power to hospitals and water treatment plants. Jorge's power plant was one of seven major plants on the island, but all of the others were down. And without those to help, his kept crashing.
SPEAKER_12: Over and over again because, you know, it would connect as many hospitals as we can, but it just wouldn't hold it.
SPEAKER_04: Jorge described this like a tug of war. The power plants are on one side and they're giants, but the consumers are on the other side and they pull hard. If one power plant goes down, the others will have to work harder and they get tired, sometimes to the point of collapse. After Maria, there was only one giant power plant on Jorge's side of the rope, and on the other side, hospitals and water treatment plants, which were pulling like crazy.
SPEAKER_12: Every time there's a collapse, you have to reboot everything again. Eight hours of work just went down the drain and you have to restart from step one.
SPEAKER_04: With just one plant that was constantly collapsing, they had to triage.
SPEAKER_12: It's like, I only have one power plant that just got fired up and I only have enough power for one of those two hospitals right there.
SPEAKER_04: Out in the field, things weren't any better. Lines were down all over the island and there weren't nearly enough workers to fix them. Eventually support would arrive from the U.S. mainland, but for the first week or so, Puerto Ricans were basically on their own.
SPEAKER_12: You know, we only had 230 power brigades. That's all we have for the company, for the island. And that is not enough. That is just not enough.
SPEAKER_04: There are about three workers in a brigade, so that's 690 people, give or take. As a point of comparison, as Florida prepared for Irma, they had 16,000 workers on call. But for anyone paying attention, it was no surprise that Prepa did not have the resources to respond to this disaster. Again, here's Daniel Alarcon.
SPEAKER_07: Before Maria, the island was in a terrible economic state, a decade or more of economic stagnation.
SPEAKER_09: Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory and popular getaway destination, is trying to avoid a default on its staggering debt. It would be the largest U.S.
SPEAKER_04: In the decades before Maria, businesses had left the island in droves as the U.S. government phased out a series of tax breaks. To make up for all the lost revenue, the Puerto Rican government began borrowing money in the form of bonds, year after year issuing more and more bonds, kind of hoping things would turn around. But things did not turn around. By the time Maria hit, the government was in the middle of an enormous debt crisis.
SPEAKER_07: And in the course of that, Prepa was not spared. And Prepa is saddled over the course of many, many years with a lot of debt, $9 billion in debt. Or could, no, it could have, no, that sounds like a lot. Can I look at my article? Sure. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_04: Daniel actually had to stop and check his notes while we were talking to make sure this was right. Wow.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, no, that's it. That's it. That's insane. Because of costs and because of debt, they're constantly postponing maintenance.
SPEAKER_04: Like, for example, in the mainland U.S., the vegetation is kept mowed so that there's basically a road that runs underneath the power lines.
SPEAKER_07: That's called right of way, right? And you're supposed to maintain the right of way to make it easy in the case of some disaster to access the fallen towers, right? So in Puerto Rico, that doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_04: When Maria hit, Prepa had been limping along. Now they would have to deal with one of the biggest crises the island had ever faced. But there was another problem, and it was a big one. They basically had no strategy for communicating with the public.
SPEAKER_12: Didn't have a presence on Twitter or Facebook. The Twitter feed was all but dead. The Facebook page was nonexistent. There was no communication saying to the people, where are the brigades working? Everything was kept hushed just to prevent conflict.
SPEAKER_04: And with little actual information from Prepa, TV news stations just kind of made stuff up — which made Jorge want to throw his television across the room.
SPEAKER_12: There was a political analyst, and he was saying — what he was saying was wrong, first, completely wrong. And not only that, he was inciting more fear and desperation rather than comfort. And I spent that night just screaming at the TV. My family was, you know, just telling me to be quiet. But that action right there is basically what, you know, it just gave me an epiphany.
SPEAKER_07: He felt like people need to hear what's really happening.
SPEAKER_12: I decided to become the news outlet.
SPEAKER_07: Jorge starts this one-man campaign to educate Puerto Ricans about electrical power.
SPEAKER_04: He'd do it on his Facebook page, and he wouldn't ask for permission.
SPEAKER_12: Update October 30. Reshare please. Spread the knowledge. Unit 9 out because of broken boiler. It will take days to repair. It wasn't 40 megawatts.
SPEAKER_07: So early on, Jorge's posts are very technical and very specific.
SPEAKER_12: Unit 8 started relay tests. Everything would be good to turn it on and generate.
SPEAKER_07: Such and such brigade would be at such and such line, you know, working to restore such and such wattage to such and such neighborhood.
SPEAKER_12: That information was basically for company use. So I decided to start leaking that information to the public.
SPEAKER_04: Every night, Jorge would come home from a 16-hour shift at work, hang his smelly clothes out on the porch, and start writing.
SPEAKER_12: Update October 31. Unit 5 and 6. I would spend around four hours just writing and calling friends on the field and asking them to validate the information. I never revealed any sources that I had because I was afraid for any backlash that they would get.
SPEAKER_04: After he gathered all the information from his sources in the field, Jorge would type out these extremely long posts, sometimes a thousand words or more, with his thumbs on an iPhone.
SPEAKER_12: Update November 3. Current demand, 993 megawatts.
SPEAKER_04: Cell service was so spotty that sometimes he'd have to drive to find his signal. His wife Charlotte, who was still pregnant, would be like, what are you doing?
SPEAKER_12: My wife would be angry.
SPEAKER_04: But then something happened. People started responding. More and more people started sharing Jorge's posts.
SPEAKER_07: Posts of his were getting thousands of reposts and hundreds and hundreds of comments. He switched at a certain point from a personal page to a fan page.
SPEAKER_12: That was my wife's idea. She realized that it was big and it was important, so I decided to post every day. Update November 4.
SPEAKER_04: Jorge wanted to give people information, but he also wanted to show them that people were actually out there working on getting their power back. It was just a really difficult problem to fix.
SPEAKER_07: There's a basic problem to the grid, which is the majority of the population lives in the north. So imagine like a rectangle. Across the middle is a mountain range and the majority of the population lives above that mountain range. And the majority of the power is below that mountain range.
SPEAKER_04: And servicing the towers and the mountains was not easy.
SPEAKER_07: That involves, in some cases, flying a tower in by a helicopter and then dropping it in and then guys hiking in and trying to set it up.
SPEAKER_04: On top of the difficulty of the work, PREPA just didn't have the supplies it needed. Remember, Marie was the third in a series of devastating hurricanes that season.
SPEAKER_09: We're live here in Houston where Harvey's rains keep coming.
SPEAKER_06: The sun returned here today and revealed the devastation left by Irma.
SPEAKER_04: This hurricane triple whammy meant that all the things Puerto Rico needed were in high demand in other places.
SPEAKER_12: So we had no materials, no anything. Like basic stuff.
SPEAKER_07: Lack of supplies of like not having enough nuts and bolts, you know, screws. You know, I met guys who were finding stuff in the grass and they're like, huh, can I use this? And this stuff is like 60 years old.
SPEAKER_04: As PREPA did the slow work of restoring electricity, Puerto Ricans who could afford them relied on generators for power. There were so many that the noise of them drowned out the natural sounds of the island.
SPEAKER_07: The sound of the coquí, coquí, coquí, coquí, like that sound had been replaced by the sound of like brrrrrrrrrrrrr, which is like the horrible, horrible, like rumble of hundreds of generators.
SPEAKER_04: Meanwhile in post after post on Facebook, Jorge did his best to explain why things were moving so slowly. You need eight, ten megawatts.
SPEAKER_12: I think he did a good job at that critical moment of trying to explain to people, you
SPEAKER_07: know, this is the reality of the grid that we have. A grid that was flawed even before Maria came and wrecked it.
SPEAKER_04: But if you scroll through Jorge's posts, you'll see that they aren't just technical information. He's also encouraging people to be their best selves and look out for each other.
SPEAKER_12: All I'm thinking is like, do you imagine if you had one community that has power and the community next to it does not, how that people are going to start, you know, lashing out and start feeling resentment and jealousy. There's going to be riots in the streets.
SPEAKER_03: Jorge, can you can you read one of these little pep talks that you wrote? I'm here. I'm going to send you one on messenger.
SPEAKER_12: Katie Mingo.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: Let me see it. Click it to open. Give me a second. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: So if you could read that maybe first in Spanish and then you can tell us what it means in English.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. It says, What it says is, I know that next to you, everything is in darkness. It's going to light up. If you're already powered up, help the ones in need. Do the best thing that you can make ice cook, clean their clothes. You are not forgotten. You are never alone. This moment will pass. That's what it says. He just brought back a lot of memories.
SPEAKER_04: Over time, Jorge's posts earned him a kind of celebrity status on the island.
SPEAKER_07: I went to go see a comedy show and he was mentioned in the comedy show and everyone cracked up like an entire theater, talking about like hundreds of people, these howls of recognition and like applause and people doubled over laughing because it seemed like everybody was checking every day what Jorge Bracero was saying.
SPEAKER_12: It's the first time in my life that I became a meme.
SPEAKER_04: One Jorge meme was an image of his face on one of those Latin prayer candles.
SPEAKER_12: They would say, don't let this candle burn out if you want power.
SPEAKER_04: Another meme referred to him as Saint Beard.
SPEAKER_12: I had a very, very rough beard. He wasn't trimmed down, so they started calling me Saint Beard, you know, just caress his beard if you want power.
SPEAKER_04: By this point, Jorge's bosses knew what he was doing and whether they approved or not, they sort of had to go along because the public was on his side.
SPEAKER_07: People were stopping him in the streets to thank him.
SPEAKER_12: When they do see me on the street, you know, they give me a hug because I'm not, I'm not usually a handshake guy. I'm more of a hug guy.
SPEAKER_04: On November 14th, 2017, Jorge's baby was born, a healthy baby girl who they named Leah. Amazingly, Charlotte's mom and dad had just gotten power the day before. So when they left the hospital, the family went straight to her parents' air-conditioned house with their new baby girl.
SPEAKER_01: This was the first Christmas in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria devastated the island. Local engineers...
SPEAKER_04: By Christmas, about half of the island had had their power restored. But the mood was grim. So many people had lost friends or relatives or had their homes destroyed in the storm. Many people were still in the dark and no one felt much like celebrating. Still, there were moments of lightness. A local musician had rewritten the song All I Want for Christmas so that instead of All I Want for Christmas is you, it says All I Want for Christmas is Luz, which means light in Spanish. Online in the rewritten song even name drops Jorge, pleading in Spanish, Jorge Bracero, please give me what I want.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, I'm sending you this song that you posted on Facebook.
SPEAKER_03: Do you see it? Oh my God, you have the video of me singing.
SPEAKER_12: Eventually, the women who wrote the parody song reached out to Jorge and they made a
SPEAKER_04: video of the two of them singing it together.
SPEAKER_02: Yo te quiero para mi y que pronto es te sací As mi señor elida, todo lo que quiero es Luz.
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, this is great.
SPEAKER_12: I'm going to watch this again later on. I forgot, I almost forgot about this.
SPEAKER_04: By spring, around 85% of the island had power. Still, there were thousands of people who didn't.
SPEAKER_07: In the spring, I visited a kind of old folks home up in the hills and at the bottom of the hill, there was power, but there, there was no power and they just couldn't understand why. And they were just beside themselves and just were desperate. And the sense of being forgotten, you know.
SPEAKER_04: Jorge continued with his daily updates, which lines were being fixed, where the brigades were headed next, and to keep up a sense of momentum, he also shared videos as new places
SPEAKER_04: got power. Like this one where an elementary school in the town of Puerto Nuevo finally gets electricity. This video was taken on someone's iPhone from the hallway of the school. Kids are running by with their arms in the air going completely bananas. The teachers are jumping up and down. It's just pure joy.
SPEAKER_11: It made me so happy to see it that I figured people would be happy to see it too.
SPEAKER_04: Every week it seemed a new town was celebrating.
SPEAKER_12: I started telling people, tape it.
SPEAKER_04: A lot of these celebration videos included fireworks, which Jorge said in real life became sort of a beacon. You'd see them from far away and you'd know.
SPEAKER_12: I think I just got power right now and this is their celebration.
SPEAKER_04: In the comments to these celebration videos, Jorge assured people that soon it would be their turn.
SPEAKER_12: Just remember that even if you don't have power right now, you will have it and this is going to be you.
SPEAKER_00: Power has now been restored to all of Puerto Rico. It's been nearly 11 months since Hurricane Maria roared ashore and took out the power.
SPEAKER_04: Only in August of 2018, PREPA announced that the entire island had been reconnected to the grid. It was six weeks before the year anniversary of Maria and just in time for the next hurricane season. PREPA, meanwhile, is arguably in a worse place than it was before Maria. There's been a lack of steady leadership over the last year with five different directors cycling through the position at the helm.
SPEAKER_07: One guy lasted, you know, like a day. There was a sense of a rudderless ship, to be honest, a sense of an absolutely rudderless ship.
SPEAKER_04: For years, a weird FEMA rule had been in place that recipients of disaster money couldn't replace anything with a different, i.e. more expensive thing. For example, wooden posts couldn't be replaced with stronger metal posts. So Puerto Ricans didn't actually get the opportunity to improve their infrastructure. It's the same grid they had before, with a population that's significantly more vulnerable. And Daniel says this part can't be overstated. Puerto Ricans were traumatized by Maria.
SPEAKER_07: It's not just that they went through this storm and then went through the aftermath of the storm. It's I think, for a lot of people, it's what the aftermath of the storm told them, which is essentially, we don't care about you. You're not, you're forgotten, you don't matter. The depth of this wound is just very, very deep.
SPEAKER_04: Now PREPA is in the process of privatizing, basically selling itself off piece by piece in hopes that a private company or various private companies will be able to deliver a better service than the government has. But a lot of people are skeptical. Jorge Bracero is still working at PREPA, still doing the hot, exhausting job of maintaining a 15-story boiler. He'd like to stop doing such hard, physical labor. He'd like someone to put him in charge of social media or put his other talents to use.
SPEAKER_12: I'm up for it. I would love that.
SPEAKER_04: But so far, they haven't. Hurricane season was in full swing when I talked to Jorge. So of course I asked him how he was feeling about that.
SPEAKER_12: When people ask me, it's like, are we ready for our next hurricane? And I'm like, no, we need a break. Just give us, I don't know, maybe two years. Just give us that time, that window in which our people can keep working, keep working, keep working so that that system can hold a little longer.
SPEAKER_07: Climate change and everything that comes with it is a reality. You know, hurricane seasons are going to get longer. We're going to see more, you know, and that's, that's pretty scary.
SPEAKER_04: Jorge told me he thinks Puerto Ricans could survive another hurricane if they had to, another year in the dark even. He wouldn't worry as much about the island devolving into anarchy as he once did. He saw the best of people after Maria, and he thinks they could do it again. Please, please, not this year.
SPEAKER_04: Jorge Brocero was not the only person in Puerto Rico to take matters into their own hands after Maria. All over the island, people were stepping into new roles and figuring out DIY solutions. But one town that Daniel Alarcon visited took this really, really far. The people actually said, to hell with waiting on PREPA. We're doing this work ourselves. Daniel will tell us that story after this.
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SPEAKER_04: So it seems like all over Puerto Rico, people were kind of taking matters into their own hands. Tell me about this town you went to that basically took it upon themselves to get the lights turned back on.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, absolutely. In this one town called San Sebastian del Pepino, they took a pretty radical step, which is that they took volunteers and sort of made, turned them into linemen and created their own kind of unofficial brigade to connect and reconnect San Sebastian to the grid. That's amazing. Yeah. The mayor, he's a charming guy with a rhetorical flourish and like knows how to give a speech and make a statement. And basically he was saying like I had no choice, like it was more dangerous to leave my vulnerable population without electrical power because a lot of people are older and sick and would have died without power. They basically got tired of waiting. They started doing the work on their own, which is super dangerous.
SPEAKER_04: Like how did they even know how to do it? Like did they watch YouTube tutorials or like?
SPEAKER_07: Well, so here's the thing. As it happened before the storm, they had bought a couple of decommissioned PREPA trucks with the buckets that rise. They bought them so they could cut brush. The hurricane comes and they're like, well, we've got these trucks. And they had one guy who had worked as a lineman and another guy who knew a little bit about it and they'd say, okay, everybody, we need help with clearing this brush so we can get to that line, to that electrical pole over there. And then everyone would take out their machetes and help clear the line and then they would go and do the work. They had their whole town connected six to eight weeks before the other towns, the other areas around there.
SPEAKER_04: Wow. And this was just okay? Like they didn't get in trouble? Like did PREPA know what they were doing?
SPEAKER_07: PREPA had to kind of, you know, they couldn't officially sanction this work. They were certainly coordinating, you know, they had to coordinate because they couldn't be energizing a line while, you know, Pepino Power Authority guys were connecting it to some poles, you know.
SPEAKER_04: So Pepino Power Authority sounds so official. Was this an official body or is this just a made up name?
SPEAKER_07: So the Pepino Power Authority is completely an informal made up thing. Pepino means cucumber in Spanish. I guess it sounds less official when you know it's cucumber.
SPEAKER_04: Well, right.
SPEAKER_07: And I think that's where you sort of realize exactly how savvy Javier Jimenez, the mayor is. It's obviously a play on PREPA, you know, Puerto Rican Electrical Power Authority, Pepino Power Authority. And it's part of knowing how to tell a story. He got a lot of play for this and it worked. One of the results is there was a law proposed after all of this that was going to loosen the restrictions for mayors and local authorities to do the kind of thing that he did.
SPEAKER_04: Just a final note, it actually wasn't a law that got passed. It was more of an agreement between PREPA and mayors of cities that basically says, yeah, mayors can do the work of connecting people to the grid if they want. And PREPA is not responsible if anyone gets hurt. 99% Invisible was produced this week by me, Katie Mingle, and reported by Daniel Alarcon. It was adapted from an article Daniel wrote in Wired magazine called What Happened in the Dark? Mix and tech production by Sharif Youssef. Music by Sean Real. The Laney Hall is the senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt, the digital director. The rest of the team includes Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taron Maza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, and feels like there's someone else. Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in B-Doc. That's beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Yeah, I'm trying to make it a thing. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. It's true. You can find the show and join the discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at KatieMingle. The show is at 99piorg. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit, too. But if you want to see the amazing Pepino Power Authority logo, yes, it involves a cucumber with a hard hat on, or if you want to print out a picture of St. Beard put on your altar next time the power goes out, you'll find all of that and more at 99pi.org. Roman will be back next week.
SPEAKER_11: Radio-Topia from PRX.
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