Christmas after a hurricane

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Christmas after a hurricane: 'We still must celebrate the holidays'
Residents in Puerto Rico, Houston and the Florida Keys talk about this year’s challenges – shelter, electricity and good cheer – to make the best of the holidays

by Norbert Figueroa in San Juan, Tom Dart in Houston and Amanda Holpuch in New York

For seven weeks in autumn, images of homes in ruins, trees stripped bare and people wading through floodwaters dominated the news as hurricanes devastated the American south and Caribbean.

The US had never been hit in one hurricane season by storms as strong as Harvey, Irma and Maria, according to modern records, and the areas hit hardest by those intense storms are still far from recovery.

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In Houston and the Florida Keys, thousands of people still don’t have homes. In Puerto Rico, full electricity services have not been restored and those that have power know it can go out at any moment. At least 200 people were killed on the US mainland in the storms and the death toll in Puerto Rico is expected to be hundreds of people higher than the 64 reported by the island’s government.

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Other islands in the Caribbean were also badly hit.

These catastrophic events unleashed death and destruction but also an outpouring of support from people with no connection to the regions affected. As the holiday season approaches, nonprofits leading the recovery continue to see significant donations that will help provide food, water and shelter to those still in need.

Three months since the trio of storms unleashed life-threatening rain and winds, the Guardian spoke with people on the frontlines of the recovery.

A unique Christmas tree in Vega Alta.
Puerto Rico: Christmas lights brighten the dark
Residents like Jessica Fontánez are decorating their houses and powering them with the aid of portable gas-powered generators.

“I debated whether to decorate or not since we have no power, but I got motivated to do it right after my nine-year-old daughter asked me, ‘Mom, if we don’t have a Christmas tree, where will Santa put all the presents?’ Now I just use the generator to turn it on for a few hours every day,” said Fontánez, who lives in the Caguas municipality.

Fontánez has also moved her traditional Christmas dinner to lunchtime to reduce the impact on her generator.

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At least 100,000 Puerto Ricans have left the island but the 3.3 million who remain have adapted their lives, and now Christmas traditions, to the limits imposed by the storm. Christmas specialities like roasted pork, pasteles and Ron Cañita are only available at premium prices and traditionally festive city squares are withholding Christmas decorations because government funds are supporting recovery efforts. The darkness has also inspired debates about decorating with Christmas lights.

In the Vega Alta municipality, the local government did not have money to use on Christmas decorations so it transformed wooden scraps, metal panels and other debris into Christmas trees, ornaments, traditional miniature homes, and cheerful boards. A dead white indigo berry tree that toppled during the storm was placed in the center of the square.

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“It’s free, natural, and local. It looks like a corpse, but what can we do,” said Juan Negrón, a resident of Vega Alta who helped deliver the tree to the square. Negrón smiled as he explained how this Christmas reminds him of his childhood holidays in the 1960s, when a small white indigo berry tree, or Tintillo as it’s known locally, would be decorated like a Christmas tree.

“Technologically, we’ve gone over 15 years back in time after the hurricane. This tree represents that. Still, we must celebrate the holidays; it’s a tradition we must not lose. We can’t stop celebrating because of these natural occurrences,” said Negron.

The dead white indigo berry tree in Vega Alta.
Three months after Hurricane Maria carved a trail of destruction across Puerto Rico, the island remains cloaked in darkness, with electricity services not expected to be restored until early next year. People there are living in a lingering disaster zone, with acts of daily life defined by the recovery: food can’t be stored in refrigerators, traffic lights don’t work in many places and restaurants, malls and bars remain shuttered.

Many Puerto Ricans have questioned the sensibility of adding unnecessary energy consumption to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (Prepa), especially when so many people still don’t have reliable access to a generator, or the money to pay for one.

Prepa’s director of occupational safety and health, Shehaly Rosado Flores, said extra energy consumption generated by Christmas decorations does not affect their efforts to restore power across the island.

The US Army Corp of Engineers estimated that power would not fully be restored to Puerto Rico until the end of May – a full eight months since Maria hit. The most remote areas will likely be the last to have power restored.

“There is not enough you can say about the need for electricity. You can’t operate society without it,” said José Calderón, president of the Hispanic Federation, which created the Unidos disaster relief and recovery program for Puerto Rico.

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Unidos has provided water filtration systems, medical support, meals, solar lamps, mosquito nets and other supplies to more than 500,000 Puerto Ricans. More than 175,000 from all 50 states and 23 countries donated to the group, which has delivered 3.4mn lbs of food and water across the island.

Calderón said he was uplifted by how many people donated, including people who have no connection to the island and children as young as three and four who he said had sent their allowance. But, three months on from Maria, he is still frustrated by the federal government’s response. Calderón said: “It is actually criminal what our federal government has done in Puerto Rico.”

Houston, Texas: ‘All I want for Christmas is housing’
Electricity returned to Houston days after Hurricane Harvey hit, but cheer was still in short supply when two-dozen Houstonians rallied outside City Hall in mid-December to sing a festive song with a twist: “All I want for Christmas… is housing.”

Christmas Day marks exactly four months since Hurricane Harvey made landfall about 200 miles south-west of Houston, dropping 50-odd inches of rain over parts of southeast Texas and causing widespread flooding.

Across the state about 900,000 people applied for federal assistance. Tens of thousands of people in Houston were forced out of their homes. While life is back to normal in much of the area, plenty of properties remain unusable and many residents are still in hotels and other forms of temporary accommodation.

People make their way onto an I-610 overpass after being rescued from flooded homes during the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey on 27 August 2017 in Houston, Texas.
Thomas Babineaux and his wife, Julie, who have an 18-year-old son, were among those who gathered to call on the city council to distribute more federal relief money quickly to fund housing for low-income families.

They had hoped to move into an apartment in time for Christmas after spending a month in a hotel. They did not leave their home when it was flooded, he said, because they had nowhere else to go. But mould and mildew quickly grew and the couple developed respiratory problems.

After losing all their possessions, it is hard to find money for presents. “We had to start out fresh,” said Julie, who has breast cancer. “We can’t really celebrate because we’ve got to find a way to get a place to stay.”

Some displaced families discovered that moving out of flooded places created a new set of challenges. Elsa Bazaldua came to Houston after her apartment in the coastal town of Rockport, a three-hour drive away, was wrecked. But the home where she currently lives with her husband and four children, paying $650 a month in rent after signing a one-year lease, is poorly maintained and the cost of water is extortionate, she said, clutching a bill for $189. She is a cleaner, though not working at the moment, and her husband works in construction. “I don’t know if we’re even going to do Christmas this year,” she said through a translator.

A home surrounded by floodwaters in Spring, Texas.
Willie Fegans loves hosting her three daughters and grandchildren for Christmas dinner but this year she is skipping the family tradition. The apartment where she lived for three years with her husband flooded up to knee height and after a spell in a hotel a charity found them a unit at an apartment complex. But the 61-year-old does not feel safe. “I’m scared to stay there because every day they’re out there shooting,” she said. “I won’t take my family there. Too much violence. I was at home cooking and I heard what I thought was two cars crashing, I went to the door and it was a dude shooting at another guy, he hit a sign and lost control.”

They sleep on the floor because they are worried that a stray bullet might fly through the window and hit them while they are in bed, she said.

On Christmas Day, she added, “I’ll probably go to one of my daughters’ houses. Bullets don’t have no name, don’t have no eyes, my family could be there and they could be out there shooting and somebody in my family could get killed. I don’t want to take that chance. “I haven’t even thought about gifts for Christmas because I’m too busy worrying about getting somewhere to live that’s safe.”

Festively decorated boats in Key West, Florida on 15 December 2017.
The Florida Keys: ‘Christmas is more powerful this year’
Hurricane Irma skirted Puerto Rico days before making landfall in Florida, where the Keys bared the brunt of the Category 4 hurricane destruction.

Tourist hotspot Key West emerged with minimal damage but three months out from the storm, other Keys islands are still recovering from the housing crisis the storm left behind.

Thousands were displaced from Big Pine Key, Cudjoe Key, Marathon and Ramrod Key where many people lived in mobile homes, houseboats or vulnerable homes that were not up to modern property codes. “For some families it’s probably going to be a year before they are rebuilt, have a place again,” said Bill Mann, co-ceo of the Florida Keys Children’s Shelter.

Mann said families are split because people have moved to the mainland, but have jobs in the keys – or vice versa – or are working more jobs to survive. Mann said one young boy the shelter assisted told them the one thing he wanted most for Christmas was to see his dad, a single father, more often because he is now working a second job.

Damaged homes in Cudjoe Key, Florida on 17 September 2017.
Floridians have donated many toys to the shelter so Mann expected the children the shelter helps will all have presents to open on Christmas day, but families still desperately need grocery gift cards and home improvement gift cards. And tourism, Mann said, because it is a foundation of the region’s economy. Caribbean islands that suffered in the storm also rely on tourism and are encouraging people to visit to aid the recovery.

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In Big Pine Key, the rebuilding effort is also coming from informal social media networks.

Hervé Thomas, who has lived in Big Pine Key since 1998, created a Facebook group to help coordinate the community’s response to Irma. For Christmas, the group organized a surprise for 12 families, including 32 children, hit hard by the hurricane – Santa Claus at their door in a fire truck, delivering presents donated by community members.

Last week, a woman who assists children in the domestic abuse system said she needed Christmas presents for seven children. Within three hours people had responded with donations, including paying for a meal for the caretaker.

“You can’t block good when it’s on its path,” Thomas said.

His home was perfectly intact after the hurricane but just 100ft away, a neighbor’s home was completely destroyed. He said Big Pine Key looked like a warzone immediately after Irma and that feeling remains in some of the devastated homes.

There are fewer decorations around the Keys and fewer homes to fill with Christmas trees, but Thomas said he felt this Christmas was more powerful than in years past.

“You can feel there is something,” Thomas said. “If I think about it I believe it’s maybe an answer to the strength of what we went through.”

He continued to say Christmas provided some relief. “You can drop everything and say it’s Christmas.”

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