As Hurricane Irma approached Puerto Rico yesterday, with its Category 5 winds reportedly peaking close to two hundred miles per hour—it is “one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Atlantic”—Carlos Vicente, a forty-six-year-old associate professor of physics at the University of Puerto Rico, climbed down from his roof and finished securing his new home. It sits about eight miles inland from the island’s northeastern coast, in the town of Rio Piedras, on a small hill about five metres above sea level. Vicente and his family had recently moved in. “I’m not a meteorologist,” he told me on Wednesday evening. “I’m a low-temperature, condensed-matter guy. I like science, though, so I like tracking the hurricanes. This is the biggest I’ve seen in my entire life on the island.”
Vicente has three daughters, between a year and a half and five years old. The youngest began to cry as we spoke. Power was out, as it soon would be for a reported million residents of the island. The peak of the storm would hit his house, Vicente thought, in a few hours, then it would move away, toward Florida, the Carolinas, and Georgia, which it is expected to reach this weekend with reduced, but still dangerous, potency. (Irma has already killed at least ten people and flooded most of the island of Barbuda.) Vincente kept track of its path on his phone as he listened to AM radio. His account, offered over two short phone calls on Wednesday night, has been edited and condensed.
“At this moment, we’re slightly calmer, now that we can see it with our own eyes. It doesn’t look great, but not having information is even more scary somehow. The whole day it’s looked weird outside. Normally, this time of year, it’s really sunny in Puerto Rico, and not that hot. But there was a stillness, and a quiet—until a few hours ago, leaves weren’t really moving at all—that was very unsettling and eerie. It’s getting darker, the trees are swaying, coconuts are falling, it’s raining. Everyone is inside their houses listening to their radios, if they can, and looking at their phones.
“A lot of the houses nearby us are pretty stormproof, fortunately. My house is concrete—it’s not going to fly away. But if you have glass windows that look nice, they’re not so practical here. My front neighbors, I just saw them finish boarding theirs up.
“Last night we were remembering all the things we’d forgotten to do. I spent most of this morning putting away stuff that could fly off: securing the A.C. unit on the roof of the house. We’d heard the winds would start increasing at one in the afternoon. I didn’t want to be on the roof of my house at that time.
“We just moved to this house recently and we found that the previous owner had left a bunch of—probably the worst thing you could have on your roof—loose, corrugated sheets of aluminum. They can fly in strong winds and they’re liable to decapitate somebody, or ruin property. So I had to find a place for them, while it rained.
“My mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law are staying with us, because they live beachfront, fifteen minutes from here. They have some natural reef protection and walls there, but still, it wasn’t the best place to be. A lot of people have gone to stay with relatives. I’ve heard that they’ve stopped taking people to shelters, because they don’t want the workers and drivers to get hurt.
“I was born and raised here. The biggest storm I remember was Hurricane Hugo, when I was eighteen. It wasn’t as strong as this one, but it just sat on the island and stayed, wreaking havoc. The sustained wind and rain of Hugo was terrible. We didn’t have electricity for about a month. We didn’t have water for six weeks. I’m pretty worried about that happening again. And now we have issues with the power grid, because the power company is pretty much bankrupt. So the aftermath—especially with my girls being so young—really worries me.
“I’m really worried about flooding in this area, too. I see water flowing through the gutters and starting to accumulate some. Fortunately, we’re about five or ten metres above sea level in this house. I hope that’s enough.
“Hold on, my daughter is crying. She’s never seen anything like this. And then an emergency kit fell on her. She’s O.K., though.
“The sky is completely overcast now. Visibility is poor. I can see the houses in front of me, but the tall buildings behind them, I can’t see at all. All the trees are shaking. There are branches all over the place. The palm trees are shedding their fronds. The coconuts are beginning to be a concern. It’s ripe coconut season and they’re falling hard. Ordinarily, loaded coconuts trees are awesome, my daughters love them, but this is scary at the moment. The winds are around seventy-five miles an hour now, I think. But the windows are holding.
“There’s a video of a crane flailing on a beach that I saw on the Internet. And I heard about a wave so big it made the tsunami alert go off. People near the shore, on the northeast, are really freaking out.”
“The storm should be over by midnight, I think … wait, my wife is correcting me. The storm will be moving away and gone by tomorrow morning. But, like I said, the effects will continue. And there’s another hurricane coming—moving in a weird, different path—so we’ll see.
“There are going to be a lot of issues, I’m sure, but the worst of it will be tomorrow. I’m not going to sleep tonight, in case it changes course.”
