My name is Scott Armour. I am an environmental health science consultant. I specialize in indoor health and green buildings — including things like air quality, mold and bacteria contamination, and remediation of storm, sewage and water damage hazards.
I have been in Puerto Rico three times since the middle of October to work for a company that conducts damage and hazard assessments on buildings and manages oversight of the cleanup and construction work. We have clients that either own or insure commercial and multi-family residential buildings. Our current work includes two large shopping malls and many other buildings that are spread all over the island. We work for and with people who live, work and invest in Puerto Rico. This allows me to travel and see close up the different levels of damage and impact from the storm.
I have someone with three generators for sale, two unused, one used for a day — big powerful commercial expensive ones — worth about $60,000 and $80,000 a piece He can’t sell them because so many are available at discount, lined up at the docks in storage! Same with all sorts of restoration equipment — all companies from the mainland are slowly but moving out daily as the big insurance jobs get complete. But roof materials are practically nonexistent, as are skilled roofers with equipment to fix them if they could.
And few of these contractors from the States will be here after another couple months. FEMA has cut back hugely — so that work force is left and leaving too.
Daily I see power lines and poles getting repaired, poles going up — but surprisingly, it’s never a huge effort, just a couple trucks and a few workers here and there. So work gets done in a trickle bit by bit, all over.
The important thing for everyone to understand, and imagine if they can, is that this is not like a big thunderstorm in Ohio or tornado in Oklahoma, where a single town gets hit, and maybe 10 or 20 homes are damaged, or California were 19 people die and “only” 200 homes are damaged by mudslides, or even Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where 1200 buildings were destroyed by fire in an area of less than a few square miles.
This is an area that stretches from downtown Cleveland to Erie, Pennsylvania, and down to Youngstown and over to Canton and on to Westfield and back up to Hopkins Airport with 3 1/2 million people in it, and around every corner there is damage. Imagine driving around Cleveland, and at Detroit and 117th there are 100 homes damaged, and a church and 35 businesses closed, then at Clark and 45th the same, and at Hilliard and 210th the same, and W25th and Pearl.
And traffic is backed up for miles at each of those normally busy intersections because there’s no power to operate stop lights, and no traffic cops because they went on strike to oppose the demeaning job of waving cars past, so the chief resigned. And now — never a cop at intersections that take one hour to go two miles to get from one side to the other of the shopping district, and you still haven’t left your own little neck of the woods
You will see this checkerboard of destruction every hour you drive for days and days. Actually you’ll be driving around for weeks to see all the damage. I know; it took me three-and-a-half days to visit 11 small businesses and one small hospital in 12 cities across all Puerto Rico, from east to west, north to south.
It’s mostly hidden from view — you actually have to look — but it’s there. And most do not have insurance; business are closed forever because even a couple of weeks closed would bankrupt them, but they’ve been shut down for four months now. Then, there is a huge number, tens of thousands, maybe 100 thousand, that are squatters and have no property rights, and their homes are unlivable. And on and on and on…