Three weeks after Hurricane Maira, and nearly a month after Hurricane Irma, we are still in recovery mode. The streets of Miami are still loaded up with debris from the storm, while teams of truck drivers and clean up monitors go block by block cleaning up the damage that was left in the wake of Hurricane Irma. Although power has been restored in parts of the San Juan metro area, the island at large remains in black out, with stressed infrastructure and relief efforts to get supplies to the more remote communities of Puerto Rico. All this while the US Virgin Islands have all but been forgotten by the constant news cycle, and a devastating earthquake in Mexico City, is no longer in the US news cycles.
The truth is that these storms have cost us more than what’s been seen in the news. This website was built deep in the jungle of Puerto Rico, in a town that has made it’s way into the New York Times, as the eye of the storm passed straight through the exact location where we spent months working on launching this website. Our home has nearly been destroyed, with doors and windows blown out, and a mess of the living space made by the winds that penetrated through the exterior of the house. We only this week were able to get people off the island, after multiple flight cancelations and an additional week of waiting for an opening for her to return to Miami.
The physical and economic effects of these storms can be seen and calculated, but the emotional and psychological trauma caused by these disasters is something we’re still attempting to process.
People have literally lost their homes and have been forced to evacuate the island, and for the less fortunate, making camp until relief efforts provide a safe space for them to continue the recovery process.
It seems we’ve been overwhelmed by whats been going in the world today, but the world doesn’t stop turning, the nature of the universe is to continue to expand, and the truth is we haven’t seen the end of anything yet.
