Hurricane Maria tore across Puerto Rico as the strongest storm to hit the U.S. territory in almost 90 years, leaving at least nine people dead and causing widespread flooding.
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The punishing winds have thrown the U.S. territory in utter chaos and devastation.
“Irma gave us a break, but Maria destroyed us,” Edwin Serrano, a construction worker in Old San Juan, told the New York Times.
With the territory in ruins, power across the Caribbean island have been knocked out.
Ricardo Ramos, the chief executive of the government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, told the CNN, the island's main power grid is completely destroyed.
Over 95 percent of the island’s wireless cell sites were out of service, Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told the New York Times.
The U.S. President Donald Trump has declared the island as a disaster area, making it eligible for increased recovery funding.
“Puerto Rico was absolutely obliterated,” the U.S. president said while in a meeting with the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko in New York.
“Their electrical grid is destroyed,” Trump added. “It wasn’t in good shape to start off with. But their electrical grid is totally destroyed. And so many other things.”
In an interview with San Juan-based WAPA radio, Puerto Rico's Governor Ricardo Rossello said the opening of the ports is a priority so that aid shipment of first aid materials, food, generators, etc, can reach the people on the island.
Officials have also announced that it could take several months before Puerto Ricans get electricity back, the National Hurricane Center, NHC, said.
After devastating Dominica and Guadeloupe and battering St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm.
The island’s capital, San Juan, was hit with sustained winds of 220 kilometers per hour beginning at 6 a.m. local time, according to the NHC.
Carmen González, 58, a resident of the Condado area, a tourist district of the capital San Juan, told the New York Times, “The country is paralyzed — it’s like a war zone,” Ms. González wrote in Spanish in a text message. “This has been devastating. The whole of Condado is full of obstacles.”
A Category 4 hurricane hasn’t hit Puerto Rico since 1932.
Fifteen people are known to have been killed in Dominica, where Hurricane Maria first made landfall, Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said.
Two people died in the French territory of Guadeloupe.