Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
Hello,
As you surely know, I have long planned a vacation to Puerto Rico. I
turns out I arrived one day after hurricane Irma (9 Seot). Life was
difficult -- no electricity for a few days, but livable, but I never
counted on a second hurricane named Maria, which arrived one day before
I was due to leave (21 Sept). So my flight was cancelled and had the
full experience of a category 4 hurricane. Very interesting and
exciting, but lots of problems for Puerto Rico -- no electricity (still
only about 5% have electricity), no traffic signals, no running water,
4-10 hours waiting to get gas, 3 hour wait to get food, which was
rationed, ...
When Maria arrived, my departure was changed to 25 Sept, but due to the
extensive infrastructure damage it was pushed out to 2 October. I was
lucky enough to be able to experience this terrible event and to leave
on 2 October. I am fine and feeling lucky to be able to leave ...
Though I am still recuperating from the heat and mosquitoes, part of me
regrets leaving Puerto Rico, where the people are really handling major
problems by being kind and helping each other. Compared to previous
hurricanes such as Katrina, the death toll has be very modest. I
attribute this to early warnings to the population, shelters, and the
fact that a large fraction of PR houses are made of concrete rather than
wood as in other areas. The low death rate has lead certain US public
officials to conclude that Maria did not inflict much damage -- wrong.
Maria was disastrous to Puerto Rico and to its economy. If they are
able to reboot the economy Puerto Rico will come out of this problem,
but getting started is hard when there is no electricity, food, and
fuel. People cannot get to work so even 10 days after the hurricane a
huge number of businesses were closed.
In a certain sense, I leaped from the frying pan into the fire, because
the second half on my vacation is in Barcelona, where there is a rather
major Catalan independence movement that is currently playing out.
I hope to be back at home (in Switzerland) Tuesday 10 October.
Best regards,
Kern
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