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Governor Signs Disaster Declaration as New Earthquake Rattles Puerto Rico ‘Too Much’: Dread Fills Puerto Ricans as New Earthquake Stuns Island
(about 4 hours later)
GUÁNICA, P.R. — Signs of life had returned to the coastal towns in southern Puerto Rico on Saturday when they were stunned — again — by a 5.9-magnitude aftershock that brought new power outages, damage and fears that perhaps the worst of the island’s incessant shaking was not over. GUÁNICA, P.R. — Not long after José Méndez Marrero, a civil engineer, arrived on Saturday to inspect the damage at a Puerto Rican town crippled by a big earthquake, the ground beneath him groaned. Again.
With damages now reaching $110 million, Gov. Wanda Vázquez said she had signed an official disaster declaration asking the federal government to clear the way for additional federal assistance. The woman he had been chatting with on the street began to run into her house.
She also said the government would impose a consumer price freeze on gasoline, as well as emergency items like water containers, sleeping bags and tarps. “No, señora!” he hollered behind her. “To the plaza!”
“It’s important that our citizens know that we need to stay calm,” she said at a news conference Saturday afternoon. “This was expected.” It was another scary one — a 5.9-magnitude aftershock, on the 15th day since tremors large and small began terrorizing southern Puerto Rico. The quake stunned the island just as signs of life, like trucks selling fresh fruit on the side of the road, had started to return. Now there were more power outages, more cracked buildings, more feelings of dread that the worst of the shaking was, somehow, not yet over.
The main highway into Guánica, near the latest quake’s epicenter, was blocked off by the police and National Guard, who raced to the scene after a huge crack opened in the asphalt on a bridge. A traffic jam formed on the perimeter road, which unlike earlier in the week, was full of local fruit trucks and people trying to return to their normal routines. “Too much,” declared Israel Vélez Irizarry, 49, as he sought shelter in his 1993 Chevrolet Lumina parked outside his aunt’s house. The items inside — pillows, blankets, toys — told the tale of the nights he, his mother, his wife and their three children, ages 3, 7 and 8, had spent waiting for the trembling to end.
The temblor, which hit eight miles southeast of Guánica shortly before 9 a.m., was the strongest aftershock yet in the wake of the 6.4-magnitude quake that hit the island on Tuesday. “We haven’t been able to shower or anything,” Mr. Vélez said. “It shakes and it shakes — and it looks like it wants to keep going.”
Scores of smaller temblors that have rattled the island in recent days, including a 5.2-magnitude aftershock on Friday. Seismologists said they were a sign that the island’s multiple faults may have started activating one another. His wife, Desirée Rodríguez, 33, loaded a suitcase into the trunk of the car. They planned to fly on Sunday to Kentucky, to stay with Mr. Vélez’s oldest son.
With a fifth of the island still without power going into the weekend, Saturday’s aftershock brought new electrical outages to areas around Ponce, Lares, Adjuntas and San Germán in the southern part of the island, officials said. Even before Saturday’s major aftershock, which fissured more roads and prompted more landslides, Puerto Rico estimated damages from a 6.4-magnitude quake on Tuesday at $110 million. Gov. Wanda Vázquez asked the federal government on Saturday to approve a major disaster declaration, which would clear the way for additional federal assistance, including funds for temporary housing. President Trump approved an initial emergency declaration last week.
The Puerto Rico Electrical Power Authority had said it hoped to restore power across the entire island as early as Sunday, but the new outages could complicate that forecast. About 35 percent of the island’s customers were without power on Saturday afternoon, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said. “We need to stay calm,” Ms. Vázquez said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon. “This was expected.”
Even if power is restored by Sunday, “there will be little to no reserve capacity,” the agency said. For Mr. Méndez and some two-dozen members of the Puerto Rico Engineers and Surveyors Association who gathered in downtown Guánica, near the epicenter of the quakes, the violent quake on Saturday prompted Félix Rivera Arroyo, president of the association’s earthquake commission, to issue a stern reminder: No going inside buildings. Visual observations only, an initial inspection to guide future work.
The federal Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, declared a public health emergency in Puerto Rico to help guarantee adequate health care services under federal aid programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Mr. Rivera’s cellphone kept ringing. Emergency managers from towns like Mayagüez and Aguadilla called asking for expert help.
If President Trump signs a disaster declaration, it would clear the way for additional federal disaster aid, including temporary housing for those who have been displaced from their homes. The engineers moved gingerly on the deserted streets among downed power lines and crumbled bits of sidewalk. Guánica’s old City Hall looked pretty good. Its new one was roped off with yellow tape, with part of the building lying about two inches lower than the rest, the engineers estimated. They examined a worrying crack in the surrounding asphalt.
Across the region, thousands of residents have been camping outside in empty lots and along roadsides, fearful of returning to damaged homes, or structures that could collapse with new aftershocks. A dead iguana lay nearby. A rooster crowed. Mr. Méndez kept moving his small group away from two-story buildings, power lines and poles and into the streets.
Saturday morning’s temblor brought people outside once again, with many expressing fears that the aftershocks were getting worse. “This is brutal,” said Erasto Garcia, one of the engineers. “I had never seen this, ever.”
“This is really screwed up,” said José M. Nazario, 76, said as he again looked in on his small, two-story house near the center of Guánica. The structure still stands, but the series of quakes damaged windows and tiles, broke a dish cabinet, knocked out drawers and broke a toilet. For four nights, he has slept in his Toyota Corolla. Behind City Hall were the ruins of the pancaked Agripina Seda middle school. From afar, it looked to the engineers like the damage might have been caused by the so-called short column effect, a construction problem that Mr. Rivera said he had seen in other collapsed schools in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Venezuela. Mr. Méndez noted that the school was on higher ground and wondered if it had been built on unstable fill.
“They say a 7 or 8 could be coming,” he said. “I don’t know. But they keep getting stronger.” Puerto Ricans will have to prepare for lengthy inspections different from the ones they are used to after hurricanes, cautioned another engineer, Marilú De La Cruz. “There has been so much disinformation about past inspections that are completely irrelevant” to seismic activity, she said.
The United States Geological Survey has warned of a strong chance of continuing aftershocks of 5.0-magnitude or greater, but said Saturday morning that the chance of a temblor stronger than Tuesday’s big quake was only 4 percent. Elizabeth Vanacore, a seismologist with the Puerto Rico Seismic Network, said tremors would continue for at least a few more weeks. She said the many aftershocks were a sign that the island’s multiple faults may have started activating one another. Smaller quakes were so frequent on Saturday that the engineers and residents stopped telling each other every time they felt one. Several people said they had spent much of the past week with a dull headache or mild dizziness.
Elizabeth Vanacore, a seismologist with the Puerto Rico Seismic Network, said tremors would continue for at least a few more weeks. A strong aftershock, like the one on Saturday morning, will also cause its own aftershocks, Ms. Vanacore said. In spite of the strong morning aftershock, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the strapped public utility, said about 96 percent of its roughly 1.4 million customers had electricity. More than 6,000 people are still sleeping outside their homes, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, about half in outdoor government shelters and half in improvised camps.
The fact that there are multiple faults within and around the island means that one earthquake can activate nearby faults, which Ms. Vanacore said may have caused Saturday morning’s earthquake. Nongovernmental organizations set up 19 mobile feeding sites. Mayors from less affected towns were bringing in help, and the National Guard pitched tents and distributed adult and baby diapers, wipes, juice and insect repellent.
“We suspect that we have at least a few faults involved right now,” she said. She likened the high density of faults to a crowded subway car, in which people bump into each other, causing a chain reaction of collisions. But much of the assistance on Saturday came directly from other Puerto Ricans, which set out in small convoys and crammed the highway south from San Juan, the capital, and other parts of the island.
She said there were three possibilities for what happens next. The most likely is that the aftershock sequence will continue, but get weaker and eventually stop. There also is a low probability that there could be another 6.4 earthquake, an event known as a doublet. The most ominous — but least likely — possibility is that Tuesday’s 6.4 earthquake was a foreshock for a stronger earthquake that has not yet come. Fifteen members of the extended Ruiz family from Cabo Rojo woke up at 6 a.m. to cook 160 meals of rice and chicken in Raymond Ruiz’s food truck. They packed it in Styrofoam containers, encased them in plastic wrap and drove to the La Luna neighborhood in Guánica, intent on helping people who were making do away from the major shelters.
“I know everyone is quite afraid because they’ve been feeling earthquakes for weeks,” she said. “Here, my love, God bless you,” Heidy García, 45, one of the family members, said as she delivered the meal and a cold water bottle to María Santiago Lamboy, 82.
FEMA officials said that about 3,500 Puerto Ricans were out of their homes and living outside, while an additional 4,000 were staying in 30 shelters set up in the affected region. Nongovernmental organizations had set up 19 mobile feeding sites. “You are saints,” responded Ms. Santiago, who has been sleeping in her car since Dec. 28.
Last week, Florida’s two Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, along with Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress, Jenniffer González-Colón, urged Mr. Trump to approve additional federal assistance. Once they were done at the camp, the family drove uphill, going house to house asking people if they were hungry or thirsty. They crossed paths with a white pickup truck — Sister Julia and Sister Juliana, Dominican nuns in full habit who said their convent had lost two houses. They had still managed to cook a vat of paella on the patio.
“The localities that are grappling with the effects of the earth tremors are smaller municipalities that do not have the necessary resources to handle the situation alone, and the Puerto Rico local agencies are taxed to their limits by their fiscal condition and the continuing larger recovery effort,” they said in a letter to the White House. Some evacuees, like Luis Quiles Medina, 69, had tears in their eyes as they spoke of their prolonged anxiety over the quakes. “I’m trying, but this just rattles the nerves,” he said. “It’s not easy.”
Mr. Trump approved an initial emergency declaration earlier this week. In a driveway of another house, the Ruiz family held a prayer circle with three families. They, too, wept.
At an improvised aid center in Guánica set up for things like water, toilet paper, diapers and vienna sausages, residents described Saturday’s aftershock and the sense of nervousness that has again taken hold. “I’m not scared of the tremor,” said Mara González, 46, who left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and returned just six months ago. “I’m scared of not seeing my grandchildren again.”
José Luis Feliciano, 34, said he was driving when he felt his car swaying “as if three people were pushing against each side.” As the sun set in the nearby town of Guayanilla, the parish celebrated its first Mass since Tuesday, when the major quake crumbled most of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. More than 50 members of the congregation gathered on brown metal folding chairs under white tents by the side of the church.
Reinaldo Morales, 57, said he had slept for the first time all week on Friday night by leaving his house and pitching a tent next to his car. By the time the ground rattled again, he felt calmer. “We are fine physically, but emotionally, we are not,” said Luz Torres, 52, tearing up ahead of the Mass. “This has changed our lives.”
“We know we’re safer outside,” he said. The quakes have made the island feel unfamiliar, betrayed residents’ sense of reality.
Patricia Mazzei reported from Guánica, P.R.; Edmy Ayala from San Juan, P.R.; and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reported from New York. “We’ve moved to California,” the Rev. Adalín Rivera Sáez, the vicar who led the Mass, joked in a rare moment of levity.
“Someone told me this week, ‘They changed our little island,’” he added. “The little island is the same. We are just in different circumstances. We have to live with that.”
When the aftershocks come — and there will be some, he emphasized — Father Rivera advised his congregation to pray, and also duck and cover.
“Now,” he concluded, “let’s give each other a big hug.”
Edmy Ayala contributed reporting from San Juan, P.R.; Frances Robles from Miami; and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York.