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A woman stands next to her apartment door at the Las Teresas retirement community, where about two hundred elderly people live without electricity following damage caused by Hurricane Maria in Carolina, Puerto Rico.
A woman stands next to her apartment door at the Las Teresas retirement community, where about 200 elderly people live without electricity following Hurricane Maria in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters
A woman stands next to her apartment door at the Las Teresas retirement community, where about 200 elderly people live without electricity following Hurricane Maria in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Life or death as Puerto Rico's older people go without essentials

This article is more than 6 years old

At Las Teresas retirement home, lack of power for lights and elevators means residents are stranded in the stifling dark two weeks after hurricane Maria

When the volunteers reached the second-floor landing at Las Teresas, a retirement community on the outskirts of San Juan, they found an elderly man in wheelchair sitting alone in the dark.

He was a double amputee and was clearly in a bad state. It wasn’t clear how long the man had gone without food, but he sucked ravenously at a nutritional shake he was offered while a doctor started to examine him.

Four floors up, the team came across a white-haired woman in a housecoat printed with dainty flowers. She was leaning against the partially opened window through which came the faintest of breezes.

“What do you need?” asked one of the volunteers. “Food, water, medicine?”

“All of them,” she replied faintly.

“You don’t have anything?”

She shook her head, and as the volunteer embraced her, she began to sob.

The humanitarian crisis which Hurricane Maria unleashed on Puerto Rico has affected all of the 3.5 million Americans who live on the island. But at the territory’s retirement homes, more than a week without drinkable water, electricity or communication has become a matter of life or death.

Elderly people are particularly vulnerable during natural disasters; when Hurricane Irma hit the US mainland last month, the biggest single death toll was the 12 residents of a Florida nursing home who died after being left without air-conditioning in the sweltering heat.

Puerto Rico’s power grid was knocked out completely by the storm, and officials say that it could take up to six months for electricity to be restored. Without electricity, many older people are stranded on their apartment floors because the elevators don’t work and they can’t walk up and down stairs.

Fresh supplies of medicine, food and water are unreachable without caretakers or administrators who have left to deal with their own problems or have been prevented from reaching the buildings by the debris that still blocks many roads.

At Las Teresas, two apartment buildings for people older than 62, residents were dehydrated, without food and low on medical supplies including oxygen tanks.

A man uses a flashlight to light up a room at the Las Teresas retirement home. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

The administrator had left before the storm, so residents who had not been retrieved, or visited, by their family were on their own – until this weekend, when a small brigade of volunteers arrived at the building, offering food, clean water, medicine and hugs.

The brigade, organized by San Juan’s municipal government, was one of many groups which have arisen as the island’s community struggles to respond to the disaster. The volunteers, between 50 and 100 people each day, include former police officers, teenagers, lawyers, medics and city workers.

In the first 10 days after Maria hit, they made more than 20 trips to retirement homes and sheltered housing.

“I am wary if we don’t do something quickly, there will be a mounting number of people who die,” said Rolance Chavier, a doctor who has been volunteering with the group.

The official death toll from Maria remains at 16 people, but it is expected to rise.

The island’s healthcare system was crippled after the storm, which could mean the storm’s toll is dozens or hundreds higher than the government has reported, according to Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI), a local investigative journalism project.

“This is San Juan, where provisions exist,” Chavier said. “Imagine the center of the island where no one has gone for eight days.”

The operation at Las Teresas was frenetic, but Chavier kept a steady pace as he made rounds at each apartment, speaking to residents about their medical history and current needs.

Even after all the floors were canvassed, and lists of medication compiled, Chavier insisted on meeting each resident – chatting and laughing with them about their lives while checking out bruised feet and legs and symptoms of dehydration.

One woman, a 93-year-old about half the doctor’s size, was so delighted by his company she wouldn’t let go of his wrist. She held tightly until he insisted on taking a photo with her: “I look so old,” she said after.

Another woman would not respond when volunteers asked if she needed food or water; she closed her front door, insisting that she had to put on smarter clothes before continuing the conversation. She emerged a minute later in a polka-dot blouse and jaunty hat.

Luis Vega Ramos, a member of the Puerto Rico house of representatives, was coordinating the volunteer brigades. Volunteers to help rebuild the city were not lacking, he said – but there was a desperate need for equipment. “There are enough people here ready and willing to do the work but they don’t have the tools – the resources are not getting to them,” he said.

The most common word that echoed in the halls of Las Teresas during the mission was “falta” – a need, lack, absence or shortage. The doctor, volunteers and residents chanted it back and forth on each of the building’s 11 floors.

It was this aid gap – which persists nearly two weeks after the storm, that drove one of the volunteers to bring his own 350lb supply of goods from the mainland.

Nicolás Jiménez was raised in Puerto Rico but has lived in Philadelphia for 12 years. His family on the island was fine but he still felt compelled to travel there with checked baggages carrying food, water, duct tape, batteries, chainsaws and a generator.

“I didn’t really feel like I have a choice [to come here],” Jiménez said. “Somebody had to. I still don’t really feel like the aid is here like it needs to be.”

That was clear at Las Teresas, where the most pressing need of all – shortly after medical care – was for food.

Volunteers checked residents’ refrigerators, which were almost always empty or filled with food that had gone bad. One woman had bowls filled with cold soup set alongside piles of dirty dishes on her small kitchen counter.

I went to a retirement home in San Juan today with volunteers. No elecricity, no more administrators. This is what the fridges looked like: pic.twitter.com/LruqUPfqIN

— Amanda Holpuch (@holpuch) September 30, 2017

Gustavo Ruiz, a resident who was born and raised in New York, was spry and chatty, and unlike most of his neighbors, has been able to leave the building to buy food.

He said he had waited two hours for a sandwich, but seemed philosophical about his plight.

“Everything considered, we’re happy we’re alive,” he said.

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