Sunday, January 12, 2020

 This photo has pretty much nothing to do with this post. It's just a cool photo of the ocean yesterday.

First, the important stuff: In the midst of all the earthquakes in Puerto Rico you may or may not have read about, we are fine. We have felt some of the larger quakes; several of them shook the house. But we are fine and safe.

So our saga begins before this current round of earthquakes (although a number of smaller quakes have been happening in the same area since December). Spin back to last Friday. I was on the road back from San Juan visiting Ben with a friend. A cop on the road next to me noticed that my marbete, the annual registration sticker, was expired. He pulled me over to tell me. Now, he could have been a nice guy and reminded me, but no. He wrote $350 worth of tickets. And, he did what they do here to convince you to actually get your registration: he took the license plate off the car. Once you get the new marbete, you can get your plate back and actually get the tickets waived.

The DMV used to mail the new registration form as a reminder. They stopped doing that. With the holidays and everything else, I/we simply forgot it was due, My friend told me we could get the new form online so Friday night I tried - unsuccessfully - to get the form online. That meant Elaine, because the car is her name, would have to go to the DMV on Monday to get the form. That would add a whole extra day to the process. Then we had to take the car to a local inspection place, get the new marbete, and drive halfway back across the island to get the plate back and start the process of getting the tickets waived.

Somewhere in the middle of Friday night I had a brainstorm about what we might be doing wrong with the online form. WEPA! Got that fixed, got the form, off to the inspection station on Saturday, cutting that extra day off the process. It took some work but we finally got through the inspection, got the new marbete, and we're good to go on Monday.

Now we get to the earthquake part.

In just over hours beginning Monday morning there were six earthquakes off Guanica and Ponce on the south side of the island measuring M4.5 or larger. The largest was a M6.5 just before 4:30 AM. We felt that one. It rocked the house. It was followed by M5.0, M4.5, M6.0, and M5.8 aftershocks. (The aftershocks in that same range have continued all week.)

The big one knocked out power island wide. It is estimated that at one point 97% of the island was without electricity.

The earthquake severely damaged the largest power-generating plant on the island, the Costa Sur plant. It generated about 40% of the island's electricity. That is a lot of generating capacity to lose at one time. The electric authority is trying workarounds and trying to ramp up generating at other facilities. It's not like they can buy electricity from neighboring states. And unlike post-Maria where the problem was downed transmission lines, this problem is with generating capacity. The lines are there. There's just nothing to fill them with. Engineers initially said the Costa Sur plant may not be repairable. Later reports said it may take a year to repair it.

The governor declared a state of emergency. All government offices and schools were closed. Traffic lights were out. Lines immediately formed at gas stations. These were nasty, panicky lines, not the friendly we're-all-in-this-together lines after Maria. A friend whose family owns the gas station up the road was directing traffic with a gun in his hand.

We lost power before the trembling stopped. But hey - we have experience living without electricity. And we are grateful! Our house is not damaged. We are not sleeping outside or in our car. We have water - a third of the island didn't have water because of the loss of power to pumping stations.

A lot of people are freaking out. I'm sure the PTSD is kicking in for people who were here post-Maria. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people really are sleeping on the ground or in cars because they are afraid to be inside. Some don't have an inside to go to.

Elaine's other non-profit, Calorcito p'al Corazon, was created to take blankets into emergency rooms in hospitals locally. Yesterday we packed up 100 blankets and one of the volunteers and her husband and sister took them to Ponce to distribute.  We heard from her last night they are back safe in Isabela. They were too tired last night to give us details.

How does all this connect to the license plate story? Without electricity, all government offices, including the one that has my license plate are closed. We heard (a rumor) that office was open on Thursday so I drove to Arecibo in the truck. Nope. Locked up tighter that Ft. Knox. There really is no way to find out if they're open or not except to drive there. They don't answer the phones in the best of times.That's an hour-and-a-half round trip and a lot of gas to find out they are closed. So still no license plate.Our car is a big paper weight sitting out front.

Electricity is slowly coming back. We got power back at 10:00 PM Friday, lost it for for four hours on Saturday, then got it back again. We're hoping this time it's here to stay. But again, not everybody in Isabela has light yet. Hopefully, Arecibo will get light this week and we can end this saga.