Alejandro A. Alonso Galva
The woman was crying and screaming as she handed her baby over to Edgar Gomez. He works communications for the mayor’s office, taking pictures and organizing community groups. But Hurricane Maria blackened the Puerto Rican sky that afternoon. So last September, everyone was a rescue worker.
“It was an all hands on deck situation,” says Gomez, “You see it in action movies and you think they’re just exaggerations. But we all have stories like that now.”
The storm surge had crashed against the mouth of the island’s biggest river, Rio de la Plata, with the 90,000-person town of Toa Baja trapped in the middle. Water was coming out of the ground through the manholes and drains.
“Frankly, we weren’t prepared for a hurricane like this,” says Mayor Bernardo Marquez Garcia. “Not in Toa Baja or in all of Puerto Rico.”
Garcia’s administration sent out rescue missions to fetch the stranded. They filled buses and dump trucks with however many people would fit, sending them up the hills to safety. When gas ran low, men waded in chest-high water so kids, women and the elderly could ride in a vehicle. When the five emergency-designated public schools filled to capacity, city staff broke down the doors of six other schools to make room for more refugees. Cell phones and walkie talkies stopped working. Two hospitals collapsed. The electrical grid failed. Soon Toa Baja faded from the world behind a wall of water and digital darkness.
By dawn, Garcia’s team had evacuated more than 3,000 people. Others were washed out to sea or drowned in their homes. Some later died from lack of water, medicine or food. More than 4,600 people in Puerto Rico died from the storm. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, Maria was the deadliest U.S. natural disaster in 100 years.
“Yet if it wasn’t for the effort of the collective community, in the time it would have taken for the federal government to respond, it would have been even more disastrous,” says Garcia.
This week, Mayor Marquez Garcia stood on the fifth floor of a Madison high rise, emotionally recounting the chaotic 72 hours following the storm to a small group of Madison Latino and business leaders. The state Capitol glowed in the night sky through the windows.
Alejandro A. Alonso Galva
Garcia is in Madison visiting Madison Mayor Paul Soglin as part of a mayoral exchange program created by Open Society Foundations. The initiative pairs Puerto Rican mayors with colleagues on the mainland who can provide guidance and resources in the recovery effort.
Between Soglin’s visit to Toa Baja in April and Garcia’s follow-up trip to Madison, the two mayors have become simpatico, bonding across oceans and language barriers. Throughout Tuesday the two discussed their belief in worker co-ops, strong neighborhood organizations, and the role government should play in the community.
“It’s been great to share with [Soglin],” says Garcia. “Particularly because we have a similar vision on how to run our governments with a focus on community.”
All day, Soglin connected Garcia with city specialists. He introduced Garcia to the city’s experts in food policy while stopping by State Street’s food carts, wellness experts while touring a public health center on East Washington Avenue, and community organizers while visiting the Hawthorne Public Library.
Garcia’s enthusiasm is palpable at every meeting, often nodding and wagging his finger at Soglin in approval as if they were basketball players on the court together.
“He gets it,” Garcia whispers to Gomez.
Two meetings on solar panels and their potential for powering homes and mountain neighborhoods during blackouts inspire hope. Creating a system of solar panels, batteries, and outage-resistant refrigerators to keep necessary foods and medicine cool could save thousands of lives.
“In remote areas of the island and critical areas of the city, there’s a need to have electric power when the system goes down,” says Soglin.
Alejandro A. Alonso Galva
Garcia had been mayor for only nine months when Maria hit, pushing aside his work on campaign promises like dealing with the city’s debt. But one campaign promise was not set back by the hurricane — empowering the town’s barrios.
“After the hurricane, the neighborhoods organized themselves,” says Gomez, “They realized no one was coming and started to do what they needed to do.”
But those neighborhoods still need facilities, resources and guidance for coordinating efforts.
“How do you interconnect those neighborhoods? How do you empower them?” wonders Garcia. “It’s one thing to have the vision. It’s another thing to work with someone [like Soglin] who’s done it.”
Garcia says Tuesday was the beginning of a relationship between the two cities and a long-term investment in the vision of his community.
“I want to make Toa Baja [40] square miles surrounded by reality!”
