As Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico Wednesday, people took shelter at Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan.
Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
Updated at 12:15 p.m. ET
Puerto Rico is trying to start the process of recovering from Hurricane Maria — and it's doing so after the powerful storm blew homes apart, filled roads with water and tore at its infrastructure. Flash floods are persisting, and the island has no electricity service.
"We are without power, the whole island is without power," Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico's resident commissioner — its representative in Congress — told Morning Edition on Thursday. González-Colón spoke from Carolina, near San Juan.
Maria is currently passing north of the Dominican Republic — as midday neared on Thursday, its eye was 105 miles east-northeast of Puerto Plata and it was moving toward the northwest at 9 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. Maria's maximum sustained winds of 115 mph make it a Category 3 hurricane.
The shutdown of Puerto Rico's electrical grid has meant big changes for students like Miguel Santiago, who attends the University of Puerto Rico and works at WRTU, the NPR member station there.
Santiago tells NPR's Adhiti Bandlamudi, "We've never gone through this, you know? We've never gone through so much time — at least my generation has never gone through so much time without electricity. So ... going through my mind, it's a new life."
Other challenges, Santiago says, range from living under a nightly curfew to getting around debris and wreckage from the storm that struck as a Category 4 hurricane.
On the sidewalks, he says, "every three steps you take, there's another tree on the floor. And not just branches, but trees as a whole. You know, their roots are intact. They fell off completely. It's really hard to walk around it."
In many places, Maria ruined repairs that had only just been completed after the island was hit with a glancing blow from the massively powerful Hurricane Irma. Puerto Rico is home to 3.4 million people; Maria is the strongest storm to hit there in decades.
NPR's Greg Allen reported on the storm's effects for our Newscast unit:
"Maria dropped a record 35 inches of rain in some places. Rivers across the island are out of their banks. Authorities opened the floodgates on reservoirs making flooding worse in some downstream communities. In Levittown, west of San Juan, flooding forced residents to their rooftops where they awaited rescue.
"In the city of Las Piedras, officials say they recorded wind gusts over 200 miles per hour. Maria's high winds took roofs, destroyed homes and snapped concrete power poles in two."
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