Dec. 20, 2017 – With no electricity, no internet, no way to communicate with the outside world, all she could do was listen to the relentlessly howling wind as it hurled around chunks of debris, stripped vegetation from plants, toppled trees and power lines, and drove the torrential rain into buildings and homes.

For 30 hours. Preventing sleep, making a hot meal, seeing the news.

Hurricane Maria was a strong Category 4 storm when it hit Puerto Rico dead on, making landfall on Sept. 20. Winds were sustained at 64 mph with gusts over 150 mph at landfall. It brought very heavy rainfall throughout the island – as much as 37.9 inches in one area – and a large storm surge, generating widespread flooding, damaging countless homes and buildings, destroying neighborhoods and large areas of vegetation, demolishing the power grid, and toppling most of the island’s cell towers.

Jair Alvarez and Linnette De La Texera: A Dire Situation

Linnette De La Texera sheltered through the hurricane in her condominium.

“It was absolutely like being in a giant blender,” said Linnette De La Texera. “It literally picked up the water from the ocean and threw it against everything, and lifted up boats and threw them on a hill. Our building’s pool disappeared entirely.”

De La Texera spoke from Madison, where she was temporarily living with her son, Wisconsin lawyer Jair Alvarez of Alvarez Law. Alvarez, who practices in business and criminal law, moved to the states from Puerto Rico with his mother when he was 11 years old. De La Texera is an alumna of UW-Madison with a master’s degree in Spanish and Portuguese and has lived in Wisconsin for 15 years.

“For 30 hours, you’re so nervous you can’t sleep – because what if something happens? You don’t know what’s going on with your neighbors. You can’t open the windows for air. You’re in the dark – even in the daytime,” she said.

It took 10 days after Maria for Alvarez to hear from his mother.

He’s been through a couple of hurricanes, growing up in Puerto Rico. He had faith that his mother knew how to survive. But still, “it was very strange not to hear from her for so long,” he said.

After days of searching, De La Texera found someone with a working cell phone and asked to use it.

“I was in a restaurant when she called,” Alvarez said. “It was a good phone call.”

The beach near her condominium isn’t there anymore. “The ocean just ate it up. It’s sad – that beach was beautiful.” And the rainforest, nurtured and taken care of for more than a century, “It’s gone.”

De La Texera, like all native Puerto Ricans, has lived through many hurricanes. But Hurricane Maria was nothing like she’d ever experienced. “It was a miracle nothing worse happened,” she said.

Then there was the aftermath. Eight hours of waiting in line for gas would net you $10 worth. It took all day in line for emergency rations to get a small bag with a little bit of rice and a bottle of water. “People spent hours and hours in lines, for the supermarket, for water, for gas, for ice.”

The situation continues to be dire, she said. “Businesses can’t open. People are unemployed,” she said.

She’s not sure when – or if – she will return. She never wants to go through that experience again. “It feels like it’s a betrayal to leave the island in those conditions, but you have no other choice,” she said.

Carlos Pastrana: It’s Our Island

Carlos Pastrana is a lawyer with MWH Law Group LLP in Milwaukee, practicing in employment law. Before coming to Wisconsin in 2012, he practiced as a litigator in Puerto Rico. Quite a few of his family members still live in Puerto Rico – although several stayed with him in Milwaukee after the hurricane.

Pastrana moved to Wisconsin to raise his family. “In Puerto Rico, everything is very expensive,” he said. His mother recently moved to Wisconsin, and his brothers and sisters have also left Puerto Rico. But his wife’s family still lives on the island.

It was lucky, he said, that Puerto Rico didn’t suffer a direct hit from Hurricane Irma two weeks earlier – tracking east of the island – although it caused damage and deaths. “But Maria was slow, with a lot of water.” And it hit Puerto Rico dead on.

When Maria hit, he spent the day at home, glued to news reports on the internet that showed buildings filling with water, doors and ceilings blown down. Watching the storm in real time was “nothing like I’d ever seen,” Pastrana said. And it made him feel helpless, that he should be there, going through it with other Puerto Ricans. "Ultimately, I sacrificed a lot to bring my family here, to give my children a better life," he said. But there’s still the guilt of not being there.

It took a week for them to hear from his in-laws. “That was the worst feeling in the world,” Pastrana said.

In the days immediately following the hurricane, Pastrana looked into taking a flight to the island to help. But the airport was damaged, there was no power, no transportation, and very little food. He realized the best he could do was donate to organizations with “boots on the ground” who are helping. And he plans to go soon. “There will be a lot of work to be done in the coming years,” Pastrana said.

Once flights resumed, his wife’s family came to Milwaukee to live with them – nine family members who spent their time in Wisconsin purchasing supplies to send back home.

Struggling with a type of survivor’s guilt, he’s found other ways to help, working with local Latino groups who are sending supplies. “We literally spent a day unloading a truck of supplies from Chicago for Puerto Rico,” he said.

And the community in the States has been “phenomenal.” “The diaspora has been active throughout the U.S.,” he said. “It’s our island.”

Meanwhile, his home remains open for family members who need a place to stay – although he also worries about what is happening to the population in Puerto Rico. Businesses – especially small businesses – have been severely impacted, and many may never reopen. The number of people leaving, he said, is “astronomical.”

“Unfortunately, many who have left may never return,” Pastrana said.

The silver lining? Discovering that people care. “The human toll is encouraging them to act. People care, even if they don’t know a Puerto Rican personally or have been there. And that’s great,” he said.

Gerardo Hernández: A Silver Lining

Gerardo Hernández earned his J.D. in Wisconsin in 1993 – and returned to his native Puerto Rico after earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Marquette University. He is one of three partners at his firm, Navas Rodriguez & Hernández in San Juan. “We are a general practice firm and mostly do litigation,” he said.

He was in college in 1989 when Hurricane Hugo hit the northern part of Puerto Rico. In 1995, he returned to the island to practice law and recalls the impact in 1998 of Hurricane Georges, which downed trees and power lines and caused water damage to the building that housed the law firm where he worked.

Hernández again was off the island during Maria, at a conference in New York. His flight home – scheduled for the day after Maria hit the island – was canceled. He made it to his brother’s house in Florida, where he spent hours following the hurricane by watching national news and communicating with his wife on the satellite phone she had for her work.

It was uncomfortable to be at a distance from his wife and young children during this time. He managed to get a play-by-play from his wife. “The sound of the winds was unreal. We have never experienced anything like it.”

Unable to get a flight home for a week – the airport had to be cleared of debris, and the few flights into the island went to first responders – he spent the time helping his clients, employers mostly stateside, tackle issues from the hurricane. Their questions included how do they find out if their employees are OK, how do they get gas and power, and what to do with their employees while the business is closed.

Hernández told his clients that the best way to contact any relatives was to make a post on Facebook in the hope that they may see it. “For most people, it took about a week to hear from them,” Hernández said.

He finally was able to fly back home a week later – sharing the journey with firefighters from New York who were flying in to help. As they landed, he got his first post-hurricane view from the air. “The magnitude of the destruction was incredible,” Hernández said.

“Once I got to the island, we had spotty cell service, nonexistent internet service, and no power,” Hernández said. His firm’s office, located in a high-rise building in San Juan, had no power for six weeks – which had a big impact on his firm and practice. His firm regrouped and set up in a location off-site that had a power generator and some internet service.

Working from the temporary location, with his kids not going to school, food scarce in the supermarkets, and challenges to keeping the power and internet working, “it was pretty tough,” Hernández said. (Read his firm’s report one month after the hurricane.)

And when the power didn’t work, neither did they. They did their best to keep their clients informed by using social media. “We would post messages, saying that our phones weren’t working and giving them an alternative way to reach us,” Hernández said.

Like all firms, his – a medium-sized firm – struggled with lack of power and internet service. But he knows it was much more of a struggle for solo practitioners. “They are probably taking the biggest hit, especially those with offices in the center of the towns,” Hernández said. And with those offices destroyed, the original paperwork and deeds that attorneys have the responsibility to store and keep safe may have been destroyed as well.

It took about a month for courts to resume hearings as well. “The courts were very affected – a lot of the buildings suffered extensive water damage. Except for emergency proceedings, they didn’t open for hearings until the first week of November,” Hernández said. And the courts extended deadlines for responding to motions and appeals, taking into account the situations of the attorneys as well.

Hernández realized he didn’t have it so bad, comparatively, when he, his wife, and son and friends took a trip inland to the mountains to help put up temporary ceilings – tarps – on homes there. Food was scarce and only just beginning to reach the area. “They were still struggling to get enough food, wondering where they were going to live – and here we were worrying about no internet.”

Seeing the level of damage in the mountains was “an eye-opener for everyone,” and on another level of difficulty altogether, he said. “The extent of the damage is something I haven’t seen before.”

But Hernández also sees a silver lining: There will be a need for new construction – and that need will generate jobs. “Long term, it will help our economy,” he said.

“People are in good spirits. Culturally we’re resilient, hard-working. People here are committed to helping Puerto Rico rebound from this,” Hernández said.

Chuttie Senn: FEMA Disaster Responder

Wisconsin lawyer Charles “Chuttie” Senn is not a stranger to disaster. As a deployable field counsel for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), he responded (among many other disasters) to the 2011 Joplin, Missouri, tornado that killed 162 people and destroyed thousands of homes and buildings.

Now retired from full-time work, Senn, a former Thorp solo practitioner, deployed to Puerto Rico in early November – and will likely be there through mid-January at least. "It is humbling and amazing to be part of the team to help Puerto Rico recover."

“The destruction and devastation is everywhere, including in San Juan, where there are still very few street lights, no traffic signals, and none of the street signs have been replaced. It seems almost every building suffered some damage,” Senn said by email in November.

Since arriving, he’s helped to speed assistance to those with immediate medical needs, helped survivors obtain temporary housing, arranged invitational travel for some volunteers to Puerto Rico, worked on meeting the needs of people who self-evacuated to Florida, and worked with the Puerto Rico Housing Task Force (the coordinating group composed of Federal Agencies, Puerto Rico government agencies, and voluntary agencies).

“There are new events and challenges every day,” Senn said.

In November when he arrived, there were about 3,000 people living in shelters. Now, more than a month later, there are about 500. “We’re making progress. But we are not providing shelter or repairs as quickly as we wish we could,” Senn said. “The need for FEMA’s housing assistance most certainly will go on for years.”

FEMA is assisting other needs as well. “We still have people who can't get durable medical supplies or generators to run their oxygen concentrators,” Senn said. “So we are scrambling to do what we can, or hook them up with voluntary agencies who step in and fill the gaps where FEMA can't help.”

Three months on, power remains the primary issue. “While the island may be producing power, there are still many challenges in getting it delivered,” Senn said. “I can't picture many other parts of the U.S. where there would not be great civil unrest if they had no electricity for two months.”

With the power grid in such disarray, “I admire, appreciate, and marvel at the patience of the population,” Senn said.

While volunteers are working on the island, the most effective way to help, say those featured in this article, is through monetary donations to reliable charities working directly in Puerto Rico.