ST. JOSEPH, Mich. — “Devastating” was one of the words U.S. Rep. Fred Upton used to describe the hurricane damage he saw over the weekend while visiting the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
“Here we are three months after the storm and there’s still much hardship,” Upton said. “… Remember, these are Americans.”
Category 5 Hurricane Maria hit the Virgin Islands Sept. 19-20 and Puerto Rico on Sept. 20.
Upton said many people are still without electricity and safe water.
“San Juan (the capital), for the most part, has power,” the Republican from Michigan’s 6th Congressional District said when contacted by phone Monday. “But, much of the rest of the island does not.”
Upton joined fellow members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and other federal officials on the tour.
Even in San Juan, he said the devastating effects are apparent.
“On the interstate, there was debris, trees, signs, metal sheeting on the side of the road that all needed to be picked up.”
Even concrete power poles reinforced with rebar were bent over and broken during the hurricane.
Upton said Puerto Rico is coming back slowly, but wounds remain.
“We ate at a restaurant (in San Juan),” he said. “They were very cheery that we were there. I talked to the waitress. She broke down in tears talking about her father losing his home. She was glad for people to be down there.”
He said they also visited Utuado, the second largest city in Puerto Rico, and that only about 30 percent of that city has power.
Traveling also is difficult, he said, because even if a gas station has fuel, power is needed to pump it into the vehicles.
Upton said many pharmaceutical companies have factories in Puerto Rico because in the 1970s and 1980s, there were tax incentives to build them there.
“We are experiencing shortages now in a number of products because those operations have been greatly reduced,” he said.
One of the shortages is of IV bags and fluids, which has hit hospitals all over the country, including Lakeland Health.
Upton said it’s important to get the manufacturing plants up and running not only for the benefit of Puerto Ricans who work in them, but for Americans who rely on the supplies the factories produce.
“There are 250,000 Puerto Ricans that work in the pharmaceutical industry making products for the U.S. and all over the world,” he said.
Also on the tour was Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon, Puerto Rico’s delagate in Congress. She said about 2,000 people are leaving Puerto Rico every day for the U.S. mainland.
“We don’t know how many of them are going to return,” she said.
She said there are 14 medical devices and drugs that are only produced in Puerto Rico.
Gonzalez-Colon said she is happy that Upton was among the people visiting the islands. “He’s a leader. People know him,” she said. “He was there. He was very caring with the people.”
She said Puerto Rico has joined with delegations from other areas that were hit hard by hurricanes, including the Virgin Islands, Texas and Florida, to ask Congress for more money and supplies to rebuild with.
Upton said the Virgin Islands are in even worse shape.
He said they visited a hospital where they had to wear masks because the mold is so bad. Yet there are patients there because they have no other hospital.
In one spot, he said people are living on an old cruise ship because so many homes had been destroyed.
Of the homes that remain, he said many on both islands lost their roofs. He said blue tarps have been handed out by federal aid workers to serve as roofs until they can be replaced.