99% Invisible - 327- A Year in the Dark

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

Early on the morning of September 20th, 2017, a category four hurricane named Maria hit the island of Puerto Rico. It was a beast of a hurricane -- the strongest one to hit the island since 1932. Daniel Alarcon went down to Puerto Rico to report on the aftermath of the storm. He wrote a piece for Wired about the almost year-long struggle to get power working on the island, and the utility worker who became a Puerto Rican folk hero. A Year in the Dark

This is 99% invisible. I'm Katie Mingle filling in for Roman Mars. In the early morning of September 20th, 2017, a category for Hurricane hit the island of Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria slamming into the island and as you heard, one official saying the island is destroyed. The first category for storm, District, Puerto Rico, in 85 years, power lines are down. Streets are impossible. Many roads are flooded. Maria was a beast of a hurricane.

The strongest one to hit the island since 1932. The wind was blowing 155 miles an hour, which is very close to being a category five. And it didn't just hit one stretch of the coast. It actually moved across the whole island, ripping up everything in its path. You know, brush everywhere, trees down, power lines down, obviously everywhere,

you know, the entire island in the dark. That's Danielle Ellercone. He spent some time reporting in Puerto Rico after the storm and wrote an article about it for Wired magazine. The next morning people wake up, they go out of their houses, their apartments, and they look out on the streets to survey the damage

and start trying to make sense of what they're seeing in front of them, you know? And one of the people out there that day, driving around in a state of utter shock, was a guy named Jorge Brasero. That's from a video that Jorge took the day after the storm. He's from the capital city of San Juan and he told me he was just totally caught off guard by how bad this storm was. It really became obviously known for everybody around that we were in deep trouble. But it wasn't for a few days when Jorge actually

made it into work that he fully grasped the scale of the crisis. He works at Prepo, which stands for Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. It's the public utility that provides electricity for nearly the entire island. I actually arrive at the power plant. I notice that I was one of the few that actually made it because most people live inland. When he gets there, he makes his way over to this big computer screen that shows the outline of Puerto Rico and inside of that a bunch of lines, kind of like a big connect to the dots with each line representing a power line. And every blinking line, it means a down power line. And the whole island was blinking. Every single line was down. Every single line in the island was down and that had never happened before.

The trajectory of Maria was almost as if it had been designed by an evil genius. The way it cut across the island was such that it essentially struck every major transmission line. The scale of the destruction to the power grid was hard even for Jorge Bracero to comprehend, and he knew that day that he would spend the next several months helping Puerto Rico recover through his work with Prepa. What he didn't know yet was that thousands of people would come to count on him, specifically him, to help them get through their year in the dark. Jorge Bracerro is one of those people who you can tell you're going to like just spicing a picture of him.

He's in his late thirties with short brown hair and a beard and he just looks like a nice guy. I think it's something about his eyes. Daniel Alercone describes him as the light-filling nerdy. He's a guy who will sit and explain to you how an electrical grade works, you know, like, and continue to explain it in my new detail even after it's clear that you like can no longer understand what he's talking about. Jorge has worked for Prepa for 13 years and his job there is a grueling one. He's responsible for operating two 15 story tall boilers. These boilers are heated by 20 giant burners that Jorge also looks after.

And so he's constantly hiking up and down these stairs that service the different parts of this massively tall equipment. It's extremely hot, you know, every day you're just smelling of petrol and diesel and it's extremely exhaust and sometimes you just hate it. When Maria hit Jorge and his wife Charlotte rode out the storm at her family's house. They weren't hurt, but they were surrounded by devastation. And they found out some really sad news. Charlotte's best friend, who was pregnant, had gone into stress-induced early labor the day the storm hit and lost the baby. This was particularly frightening to them because Charlotte was also pregnant. It was the most tense I've ever been in my life.

What if Charlotte also went into early labor? Or what if the baby was born but couldn't survive the post-Maria world with no electricity and temperatures routinely in the 90s. Because when you sleep at night, that heat was so unbearable. I'm serious. The amount of heat in the air was so brutal that you would think, you know, I'm just going to get naked outside because I can't contain the stem heat. So I'm thinking, a newborn can't survive this.

Jorge even considered trying to get his wife off the island. But eight months pregnant, they don't allow you to fly. After the storm, Jorge and Charlotte bounced from place to place, staying with friends who had generators. At home, Jorge fredded over his wife and the baby who was coming, ready or not in November. At work, things were even more stressful. The first priority was to get power to hospitals and water treatment plants.

Jorge's power plant was one of seven major plants on the island, but all of the others were down, and without those to help, he's kept crashing. Over and over again, because, know they they it would connect as many hospitals as we can but it just wouldn't hold it. Jorge described this like a tug of war. The power plants are on one side and they're giants, but the consumers are on the other side and they pull hard. If one power plant goes down the others will have to work harder and they get tired, sometimes to the point of collapse. After Maria, there was only one giant power plant

on Jorge's side of the rope, and on the other side, hospitals and water treatment plants, which were pulling like crazy. Every time there's a collapse, you have to reboot everything again. Eight hours of work just went down the drain and you have to restart from step one. With just one plant that was constantly collapsing, they had to triage.

It is like I only have one power plant that just got fired up, and I only have enough power for one of those two hospitals right there. Out in the field things weren't any better. Lines were down all over the island, and there weren't nearly enough workers to fix them. Eventually support would arrive from the U.S. mainland, but for the first week or so, Puerto Ricans were basically on their own. You know, we only had 230 power brigades.

That's all we have for the company for the island. And that is not enough. That is just not enough. There are about three workers in a brigade, so that's 690 people give or take. As a point of comparison, as Florida prepared for Irma, they had 16,000 workers on call. But for anyone paying attention, it was no surprise that Prepa did not have the resources to respond to this disaster. Again, here's Danielle Ellercone.

Before Maria, the island was in a terrible economic state, a decade or more of economic stagnation. Puerto Rico, a US territory and popular getaway destination, is trying to avoid a default on its staggering debt. It would be the largest. In the decades before Maria, businesses had left the island in droves as the US government phased out a

series of tax breaks. To make up for all the lost revenue, the Puerto Rican government began borrowing money in the form of bonds. Year after year, issuing more and more bonds, kind of hoping things would turn around, but things did not turn around. By the time Maria hit, the government was in the middle of an enormous debt crisis. And in the course of that prepa was not spared and prepa is saddled over the course of many, many years with a lot of debt, nine billion dollars in debt. Or I could know, it could have,

no, that sounds like a lot. Can I look at my article? Sure, yeah. Because I'm not sure. Daniel actually had to stop and check his notes while we were talking to make sure this was right. Wow. Yeah, I know, that's it. That's it. That's insane. Because of cost and because of debt, they're constantly postponing maintenance. Like, for example, in the mainland US, the vegetation is kept mode so that there's

basically a road that runs underneath the power lines. That's called right of way right and you're supposed to maintain the right of way to make it easy in in the case of you know some disaster to access the fallen towers right so in Puerto Rico that doesn't that doesn't exist. When Maria hit, Prepa had been limping along. Now they would have to deal with one of the biggest crises the island had ever faced. But there was another problem and it was a big one. They basically had no strategy for communicating with the public. They didn't have a presence on Twitter or Facebook. The Twitter feed was all but dead. The Facebook page was nonexistent. There was no communication saying to the people

where the brigades were working. Everything was kept hushed, just to prevent conflict. And with little actual information from Prepa, TV news stations just kind of made stuff up, which made Jorge want to throw his television across the room. There was a political analyst and he was saying what he was saying was wrong, first completely wrong, and not only that, he was inciting more fear and desperation rather than comfort. And I spent that night just screaming at the TV,

my family was, you know, just trailing me to be quiet. But that action right there is basically what, you know, it just gave me an epiphany. He felt like people need to hear what's really happening. I decided to become the news outlet. Jorge starts this one-man campaign to educate Puerto Rican about electrical power. He'd do it on his Facebook page and he wouldn't ask for permission.

Update October 30. Re-share please spread the knowledge. Unit 9 out because of broken boiler it will take days to repair. It wasn't 40 megawatts. So early on, Jorge's posts are very technical and very specific. And at eight, start at relay tests. Everything will be good to turn it on and get ready. Such and such per gate will be at such and such line, you know, working to restore such and such wattage, to such and such neighborhood. That information was basically for company use.

So I decided to start leaking that information to the public. Every night Jorge would come home from a 16-hour shift at work, hanging his smelly clothes out on the porch and start writing. Update, October 31. In a 5 and 6, 95 and 9. I was spending around four hours just writing and calling friends on the field and asking them to validate the information. I never revealed any sources that I had because I was afraid for any backlash that they would get. After he gathered all the information from his sources in the field,

Jorge would type out these extremely long posts. Sometimes a thousand words or more with his thumbs on an iPhone. Update. November 3rd. Current demand, 993 megawatts. Cell service was so spotty that sometimes he'd have to drive to find a signal. His wife, Charlotte, who was still pregnant, would be like, what are you doing? My wife would be angry. But then something happened. People started responding.

More and more people started sharing Jorge's posts. Posts of his were getting thousands of reposts and hundreds and hundreds of comments. And he switched at a certain point from a personal page to like a fan page. That was my wife's idea. She realized that it was big. And it was important, so I decided to post every day.

Update November 4th. Jorge wanted to give people information, and it was important so I decided to post every day. Update November 4th. Jorge wanted to give people information, but he also wanted to show them that people were actually out there working on getting their power back. It was just a really difficult problem to fix. There's a basic problem to the grid, which is the majority of the population lives in the north.

So imagine like a rectangle. Across the middle is a mountain range, and the majority of the population lives above that mountain range, and the majority of the power is below that mountain range. And servicing the towers in the mountains was not easy. That involves, in some cases, you know, flying a tower in by a helicopter and then dropping it in and then guys hiking in and trying to set it up. On top of the difficulty of the work, Prepa just didn't have the supplies it needed.

Remember, Marie was the third in a series of devastating hurricanes that season. We're live here in Houston where Harvey's reigns keep coming. The sun returned here today and revealed the devastation left by Irma. The once powerful hurricane... This hurricane triple whammy meant that all the things Puerto Rico needed were in high demand in other places. So we had no materials, no anything. Like basic stuff. Like supplies of like not having enough nuts and bolts.

You know? Screws. You know, I met guys who were finding stuff in the grass and they were like, huh, can I use this? And this stuff is like 60 years old. As prepaid did the slow work of restoring electricity, Puerto Ricans who could afford them relied on generators for power. There were so many that the noise of them

drowned out the natural sounds of the island. The sound of the cookie, cookie, cookie, cookie cookie cookie like that sound I'd been replaced by the sound of like mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr post after post on Facebook, Jorge did his best to explain why things were moving so slowly. You need 8, 10 megawatts on one of my own. And I think he did a good job at that critical moment of trying to explain to people, you know, this is the reality of the grid that we have, a grid that was flawed even before Maria came and and and wrecked it. But if you scroll through Jorge's posts, you'll see that they aren't just technical information. He's also encouraging people to be their best selves and look out for each other.

All I'm thinking is like, do you imagine if you had one community that has power and the community next to it does not, how that people are going to start, you know, lashing out and start feeling resentment and jealousy, there's going to be riots in the streets. Where can you, can you read one of these little pep talks that you wrote? I'm here. I'm going to send you one on the center. Katie Mingle. Yeah. Let me just click to open.orregido? Sí, sí. ¡Te he recorregido! Sí, así que si te recorregues, a través de la primera enpanes y entonces,

tú puedes decirles lo que significa en inglés. Sí, esa es... Sé que a lo mejor a tu lado está oscuro. Va a aprender. Si ya está aprendido, ayuda a los apagados. Mirar las áreas. Da de tilo mejor que pueda. Ayer, cocinas y la barropa de los vecinos. No he estado olvidado, no está solo. Este momento va a pasar.

¿Qué es eso? Yo sé que el próximo a ustedes es en la darkness. Es que se va a dar un litro. Si tú estás parecido, te ayudas a ver las cosas. Si tú estás parecido, te ayudas a ver las cosas. Si tú estás parecido, te ayudas a ver las cosas.

Si tú estás parecido, te ayudas a ver las cosas. Si tú estás parecido, te ayudas a ver las cosas. Si tú estás parecido, te ayudas a ver las cosas. What it says is, I know that next to you everything is in darkness. It's going to light up. If you're already powered up, help the ones in need. Do the best thing that you can. Make ice, cook, clean their clothes. You are not forgotten. You are never alone. This moment will pass.

That's what it is. He just brought back a lot of memories. Over time, where his post earned him a kind of celebrity status on the island. I went to go see a comedy show and he was mentioned in the comedy show and everyone cracked up. Like an entire theater, like hundreds of people, these howls of recognition and like applause and people doubled over laughing because it seemed like everybody was checking every day

what Jorge Brasero was saying. At the first time in my life that I became a meme. One Jorge meme was an image of his face on one of those Latin prayer candles. They would say, don't let this candle burn out if you want power. Another meme referred to him as Saint Beard. I had a very, very rough beard. It wasn't trimmed down, so they started calling me St. Beard.

You know, this car is his beard if you want power. By this point, Jorge's boss is new what he was doing, and whether they approved or not, they sort of had to go along because the public was on his side. People were stopping him in the streets to thank him, and when they do see me on the street, you know, they give me a hug because I'm not, I'm not usually a hand-checked guy. I'm more of a hug guy.

On November 14th, 2017, Jorge's baby was born, a healthy baby girl who they named Lea. Amazingly Charlotte's mom and dad had just gotten power the day before. So when they left the hospital, the family went straight to her parents' air conditioned house with their new baby girl. This was the first Christmas in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria devastated the island, local engineers at the time. By Christmas about half of the island had had their power restored. But the mood was grim.

So many people had lost friends or relatives or had their homes destroyed in the storm. Many people were still in the dark, and no one felt much like celebrating. Still, there were moments of likeness. A local musician had rewritten the song All I Want for Christmas so that instead of All I Want for Christmas is you, It says all I want for Christmas is loose, which means light in Spanish. One line in the rewritten song even name drops Jorge pleading in Spanish. Jorge Bracero, please give me what I want. Okay, I'm sending you this song that you posted on Facebook, do you see it? Oh my God, you have the video of me singing.

Ha ha ha ha ha. I just want to say something. Eventually, the woman who wrote the parody song reached out to Jorge, and they made a video of the two of them singing it together. To the look it oh Oh yeah this is great. I'm gonna watch this again later on. I forgot, I almost forget about this.

By spring, around 85% of the island had power. Still, there were thousands of people who didn't. In the spring, I visited a kind of old folks home up in the hills. And at the bottom of the hill, there was power. But there, there was no power. And they just couldn't understand why. And they were just beside themselves and just were desperate and the sense of being forgotten you know. Jorge continued with his daily updates which lines were being fixed where the

brigades were headed next. To the team AE brigades and the American contractors. And to keep up a sense of momentum he also shared videos as new places got power like this one where an elementary school in the town of Puerto Nuevo And to keep up a sense of momentum, he also shared videos as new places got power. Like this one, where an elementary school in the town of Puerto Nuevo finally gets electricity. This video is taken on someone's iPhone from the hallway of the school. Kids are running by with their arms in the air going completely bananas. The teachers are jumping up and down.

It's just pure joy. It's so happy to see it that I figured people would be happy to see it too. Every week it seemed a new town was celebrating. I started telling people tape it. Woo! Yeah, gonna lose! A lot of these celebration videos included fireworks, which Jorge said in real life became sort of a beacon. You'd see them from far away and you know.

That guy just got power right now and this is their celebration. In the comments to these celebration videos, Jorge assured people that soon it would be their turn. Just remember that even if you don't have power right now, you will have it and this is going to be you. if you don't have power right now, you will have it and this is going to be you. Power has now been restored to all of Puerto Rico. It's been nearly 11 months since Hurricane Maria roared ashore and took out the power. Finally in August of 2018, Prepa announced that the entire island had been reconnected to the grid. It was six weeks before the year anniversary of Maria and just in time for the next hurricane season. Preba meanwhile is arguably in a worse place than it was before Maria.

There's been a lack of steady leadership over the last year with five different directors cycling through the position at the home. One guy lasted, you know, like a day. There was a sense of a rudderless ship, to be honest. A sense of an absolutely rudderless ship. For years, a weird FEMA rule had been in place that recipients of disaster money couldn't replace anything with a different IE,

more expensive thing. For example, wooden posts couldn't be replaced with stronger metal posts. So Puerto Ricans didn't actually get the opportunity to improve their infrastructure. It's the same grid they had before with a population that's significantly more vulnerable. And Daniel says this part can't be overstated. Puerto Ricans were traumatized by Maria. It's not just that they went through this storm and then went through the aftermath of

the storm. It's, I think, for a lot of people, it's what the aftermath of the storm told them, which is essentially, we don't care about you. You're not, you're forgotten, you don't matter. The depth of this wound is just very, very deep. Now Prepa is in the process of privatizing, basically selling itself off piece by piece in hopes that a private company or various private companies will be able to deliver a better service than the government has.

But a lot of people are skeptical. Jorge Bracero is still working at PREPA, still doing the hot, exhausting job of maintaining a 15-story boiler. He'd like to stop doing such hard physical labor. He'd like someone to put him in charge of social media or put his other talents to use. I'm up for it, I would love to. But so far, they haven't. Hurricane season wasn't full swing when I talked to Jorge. So of course I asked him how he was feeling about that. When people ask me it's like, are we ready for our next hurricane? I'm like, no. We need a break. It just gave us, I don't know, maybe two years. It just gave us, I don't know, maybe two years. Just gave us that time, that window in which our people can keep working, keep working,

keep working so that that system can hold a little longer. Climate change and everything that comes with it is a reality. You know, hurricane seasons are going to get longer. We're going to see more, you know, and that's pretty scary. Jorge told me he thinks Puerto Ricans could survive another hurricane if they had to, another year in the dark even. He wouldn't worry as much about the island evolving into anarchy as he once did.

He saw the best of people after Maria, and he thinks they could do it again. Just please, please, not this year. Poor Hey, Bracero was not the only person in Puerto Rico to take matters into their own hands after Maria. All over the island, people were stepping into new roles and figuring out DIY solutions. But one town that Daniel and other corn visited took this really, really far. The people actually said, to hell with waiting on Prepa, we're doing this work ourselves. Daniel will tell us that story after this.

So it seems like all over Puerto Rico people were kind of taking matters into their own hands. Tell me about this town you went to that basically took it upon themselves to get the lights turned back on. Yeah, absolutely. In this one town called San Sebastien del Pepino, they took a pretty radical step, which is that they took volunteers and sort of made turn them into linemen and created their own kind of unofficial brigade

to connect and reconnect San Sebastien to the grid. That's amazing. Yeah, the mayor. He's a charming guy with a rhetorical flourish and knows how to give a speech and and make a statement and Basically, he was saying like I had no choice like it was more dangerous to Leave my vulnerable population without electrical power Because a lot of people are older and sick and would have died without

Power they basically got tired of waiting They they started doing the work on their own, which is super dangerous. Like how did they even know how to do it? Like did they did they watch YouTube tutorials or like? Well, so here's the thing. As it happened before the storm, they had bought a couple of decommissioned Prepa trucks with the buckets that rise. They bought them so they could cut brush. The hurricane comes and they're like, well, we've got these trucks. And they had one guy who had worked as a lineman. And another guy who knew a little bit about it, and they'd say, okay, everybody, we need help with

clearing this brush so we can get to that line, you know, to that electrical pole over there. And then everyone would take out their machetes and help clear the line and they would go and do the work. They had their whole town connected six to eight weeks before the other towns, the other areas around there. Well, and this was just okay. Like they didn't get in trouble. Like did, did Prepa know what they were doing? Prepa had a kind of, you know, they couldn't officially sanction this work.

They were certainly coordinating, you know, they had to coordinate, because they couldn't be energizing a line while, you know, Pepino Power Authority guys were connecting it to some polls, you know? So, Pepino Power Authority sounds so official. Was this an official body or is this just a made up name? So, Pipino Power Authority is completely an informal made up thing. Pipino

means cucumber in Spanish. I guess it sounds less official when you know it's cucumber. Well, right. And I think that's one of the, I mean, that's where you sort of realized like exactly how savvy, how you're humanists, the mayor is, you know, it's obviously a play on, on Prepa, you know, Puerto Rican electrical power authority, but you know, power authority, you know, it's like, and it's part of, of, of knowing how to, how to tell a story. You know, he got a lot of play for this, and it worked. One of the results is there was a law proposed after all this that was going to loosen the restrictions for mayors

and local authorities to do the kind of thing that he did. Just a final note, it actually wasn't a lot that got passed. It was more of an agreement between Prepa and Mayors of cities that basically says, yeah, Mayors can do the work of connecting people to the grid if they want. And Prepa is not responsible if anyone gets hurt. 99% invisible was produced this week by me Katie Mingle and reported by Daniel Allerkone. It was adapted from an article Daniel wrote in Wired magazine called What Happened in the Dark. Mix and Tech Production by Sheree Fusev, Music by Sean Rael. The Laney Hall is the senior editor Kurt Colstet, the digital director.

The rest of the team includes Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, and feels like there's someone else. Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in BDOC. That's beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Yeah, I'm trying to make it a thing. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. It's true.

You can find the show and join the discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Katie Mingle. The show is at 99PI org. I'm going to be You can find the show and join the discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Katie Mingle. The show is at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want to see the amazing Papino Power Authority logo, yes, it involves a cucumber with a hard hat on. Or if you want to print out a picture of St. Beard, put on your altar next time the power goes out, you'll find all of that and more at 99pi.org.

Roman will be back next week. Radio til P.I. from PRX. from PRX.