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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Sue Lani Madsen: Puerto Rico has long road ahead

The eye of the Category 4 storm swept across the center of the island. A U. S. Navy installation recorded a peak gust of 227 mph before it was blown away. The president had been criticized earlier in the hurricane season for a slow response in Florida, and FEMA was on top of this one. Even before the hurricane made landfall in Kauai on Sept. 11, 1992, federal resources were headed toward a staging area on Oahu, only 108 air miles from Hurricane Iniki’s destruction.

One of those resources was in the belly of a C-141 cargo plane with two pallets of supplies and 25 medical personnel. One of those resources was me.

The Seattle-King County Disaster Team started as a 501(c)(3) organized by a group of Seattle firefighters in 1985 to respond to an 8.0 earthquake in Mexico City. The team also deployed to earthquakes in El Salvador in 1986, Armenia in 1988, and had just returned from the Philippines when I joined in 1990.

FEMA was looking for new resources and recruited already proven private disaster response groups for a new federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team network. The SKCDT turned into DMAT WA-01. And so I found myself on a sidewalk in downtown Seattle at 3 a.m. being sworn in as a temporary officer of the U.S. Public Health Service before boarding a bus to McChord Air Force Base.

The team arrived at Hickam Air Force Base the next evening as the storm was clearing Kauai, then got stuck in bureaucracy for three days. Several different teams remained trapped at an airport hotel, waiting. We thought the U.S. Forest Service group with the chain saws should be sent first to clear both roads and red tape.

FEMA provided briefings every two hours, telling us to be ready to go in two hours. What we heard through the grapevine was the governor of Hawaii had not declared a disaster. The state was waiting for the County of Kauai to make a declaration first. Until the governor of a state or territory asks for aid, the federal government cannot legally step in. Three days later and the county commissioners in Kauai finally asked for more help.

A similar problem had delayed federal response to Hurricane Andrew. Technically, FEMA had been in violation of the Stafford Act when it mobilized teams early. FEMA only supplements state and local resources. Now governors routinely declare a disaster before a hurricane hits in order to speed the response.

We flew into Lihue on Wednesday. Our assignment was near the end of the road on the north coast at Hanalei. A National Guardsman had been killed trying to avoid downed wires on an uncleared road. The extent of the devastation was breathtaking from an open Huey helicopter flying up the island. It was awesome.

For the next 10 days, the community of Hanalei had better access to health care than they had for the last 10 years. We set up a clinic in the local Mormon church, one of the only buildings in Hanalei to escape without damage. It was reinforced concrete block and designed to survive. The other survivor was a historic post-and-beam church purportedly built by ships’ carpenters who knew a little something about wind.

Our doctors, nurses, paramedics and EMTs treated over 400 patients. Jump teams went out daily to check on those who couldn’t make it into town. Just being there from the outside and listening to stories helped ease emotional traumas. A Vietnam-era vet came in shaken by the deforestation and the helicopter traffic. One of our docs had also served, and was able to provide immediate counseling.

There was still no power by the time we left, two weeks after the hurricane hit the island. Travel was still dangerous.

Improvement would be slow. A Dec. 20, 1992, Seattle Times article, three months after the hurricane, stated: “Thousands of roofs still have plastic tarps to keep out the rain.”

It was two years before the economy was back to normal, on an island one-sixth the size of Puerto Rico, with an infrastructure that had been modernized in 1982 following Hurricane Iwa. Puerto Rico has a marathon ahead of it.