Photo By Sgt. Alysia C Brewster | CULEBRA, Puerto Rico – FEMA and municipal employees distribute water and food to...... read more read more
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CULEBRA, Puerto Rico – Delivering life-sustaining supplies to the island of Puerto Rico is difficult; delivering those supplies to a satellite island 17 miles off the coast of Puerto Rico is tougher still. Despite the inherent challenges, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Defense has been delivering water and food to the island of Culebra for more than a month following the impact of Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
“Irma was a cat. Maria was a dying wolf,” said Xavier H. Cortez, who drives a tour bus on Culebra. “The kind of wild, sick wolf that you just need to shoot.”
Culebra is a small island east of Puerto Rico populated by 1,818 people. It is closer to St. Thomas, nevertheless it is part of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Rumored to be named in honor of San Ildefonso de la Culebra, or possibly by 18th-Century pirates, perhaps to scare away potential interlopers, “Culebra” is the Spanish word for snake. However, the only snakes on the island appear on the city crest.
The city crest, depicting a crowned snake and an episcopal crozier, is prominent on the island. It is borne on the chest of many residents, volunteers and municipal employees partnering with FEMA and the DoD to bring relief to the storm-stricken island.
FEMA reports it has been delivering water and meals to Culebra since September 24, 2017. As of November 11, FEMA has provided 28,422 meals and accompanying water rations. Most of the food and water are distributed from in front of City Hall, where the names of each registered island resident are checked when they draw their rations. For those unable to travel to City Hall, such as the emergency workers on duty, those without cars and the ill, the mayor arranges for delivery; often times delivering it himself.
“We are feeding over 300 families. About 1,000 people are being fed by FEMA,” said William Ivan Solis Bermudez, the mayor of Culebra. He said getting relief to all those people requires the cooperation of many agencies and he is grateful to all of them.
Winnie Marquez is the manager of the Culebra branch of Banco Popular – the island’s largest bank.
“I think they are doing quite well, actually,” said Marquez of the island residents. She attributes the success in recovery on Culebra to the closeness of the community and the “support from FEMA and other agencies.”
The island’s “close-knit community”, in the words of Marquez, and its effective partnership with assisting government agencies is apparent everywhere.
When Hurricane Maria hit the island on September 20, 2017, Cortez, the owner and operator of Xavier Transportation, volunteered to use his tour bus to shuttle the elderly from a local retirement home to the island’s disaster shelter.
“I was taking people to the shelter,” said Cortez. “When the storm hit us there was a lot of debris and trees in the road . . . Civilians were out clearing the roads.”
Cortez said he transported about 50 people, free of charge, before the storm got too severe to drive.
“A piece of metal came flying through the air and cut right here,” he said, pointing to a six-inch gash in the metal frame of his tour bus.
The shelter to which Cortez was shuttling his fellow island residents is Culebra’s sole public school – Escuela Ecologica de Culebra. The school is not yet open to students, so it became the site of FEMA’s Disaster Recovery Center.
Thomas Ryan, the intergovernmental affairs representative with FEMA’s reserve corps, is assigned to the Disaster Recovery Center here. He is also a retired Army officer with experience in complex logistics operations such as those in the Iraq war theater.
“The Disaster Relief Center in Culebra seeks to assist local residents in obtaining many FEMA services including food, water, medical, shelter and small business assistance in the most convenient manner available,” said Ryan.
He has been in Culebra for about three weeks and already Ryan knows many of the residents, including DiMare Ramos Curbelo, principal of the Escuela Ecologica de Culebra.
“For Irma we opened the school as a shelter and we spent two days with the shelter open,” said Ramos. “After that we started school again. And then Maria came so we opened the shelter again. But that time we did not have power. So FEMA brought us a generator and that helped us keep the people in the shelter. Right now we have the FEMA Disaster Recovery Center serving all the community.”
There are needs remaining on the island of Culebra. Carlos Molanaria is the skipper of a ferry hauling people, cars and cargo from Fajardo, Puerto Rico to Culebra four-times a day. He notices many island residents ride the early morning ferry to Puerto Rico and the evening ferry back to Culebra. They are purchasing supplies on the main island.
Likewise he notices aid-workers commuting back and forth.
“Since maybe a week after the storm I see them on the ferry every day,” said Molanaria of the FEMA workers and their partnered agencies.
The U.S. military is one of those partnered agencies. As the leadership of military assistance in Puerto Rico transitions from federal forces to National Guard, the U.S. military remains committed to assisting FEMA and supporting the government of Puerto Rico in recovering from the effects of Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
Video of the food and water distribution on Culebra, including the mayor delivering meals, is available at www.PuertoRicoResponse.com.
Story by Maj. Brett Walker, Executive Officer, 65th Press Camp Headquarters
| Date Taken: | 11.12.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 11.12.2017 16:07 |
| Story ID: | 255027 |
| Location: | PR |
| Web Views: | 738 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, ISLAND HOPPING WITH FEMA AND DOD, by LTC Brett Walker, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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