# Your experiences with natural disasters **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [August 30, 2025, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-experiences-with-natural-disasters/1022615 "2025-08-30T20:39:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 74
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2025, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-experiences-with-natural-disasters/1022615/74 "2025-09-05T18:46:44Z")
Eight years ago. Hurricane Maria. Discussed contemporaneously starting [in this post of the relevant thread at the time](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hurricane-irma-and-maria/795446/396) and going on for almost a hundred posts more; and also with a brief look-back overview in this one post 5 years later about similar disasters: > [@What happens if there's a long-term electricity outage that covers a large area?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-if-theres-a-long-term-electricity-outage-that-covers-a-large-area/959829/18): > > Puerto Rico, 20 September 2017. Hurricane Maria. Jurisdiction slightly smaller in population and size than Connecticut. Municipalities ranging from 350K to 1800 inhabitants. Power grid 100% down: generation AND transmission and distribution. My house in a middle-class neighborhood in the middle of San Juan did not get mains power back until January 2018 and then intermittently. Some rural areas not until July of 2018. Cell service sustained in such places where the backup generators w… In one of the intervening years I was asked to write a speech for an anniversary message and I recall some key phrases I put in there about what it had been like: The reminder that there is power in this word that will laugh at what Man builds or plans. How millions saw what they or their parents built over a lifetime of post WW2 progress, brought down overnight… living what to planners in the mainland is a theoretical “nightmare scenario” of the whole grid going dark. Spending days with half your towns and people unreachable by any means; weeks with aid piling up at the port because the roads and trucks were not enough to spread it while the sick and infirm at the other end of those roads suffered; months to restore basic normality. But we did not fall apart. We did not turn on each other. We all had the decency to address mutual survival first; it was only after that was sort of secured but permanent recovery seemed to not get off the blocks for a prolonged time, that we started asking what was done wrong and how to change that. … That whole event saw me displaced to DC for over 6 years to work with the PR offices in DC liaising with the Federal agencies in recovery. I became too damn familiar with FEMA and CDBG-DR and the Corps of Engineers Civil Works and all that comes with them. During that time I had to also follow in-absence the 2020 Puerto Rico Earthquakes and a little bit of Covid. After the latest change of both PR and US administration earlier this year I was done at that post, and have made my way back to the Island. One thing that many of us have seen is that with this scale of disaster, on the one hand there is no real going back to “the way it was before”, but on the other, neither does it somehow Change Everything Completely. Some things and ways **are** gone for good and need to be replaced by new ones, **but** others endure, maybe having been forced to evolve a bit quicker than they were, maybe because people need _something_ to stay constant. And you can tell everyone who was around and aware for it _ **does** _ carry it in them. The way there’s any “routine” power outage, any report that there’s some low pressure off Cape Verde, any slight tremor, and the hackles rise. The immediate anxiety every time anyone talks about the FEMA budget (because sure, they have generally been disappointing from New Orleans to New Jersey to Puerto Rico to Maui to North Carolina, but it’s what there IS and we got nothing like it!). So here we are, now at Hurricane peak, and watching the daily reports, as the way it is. Necessary preparations taken when called for and always hoping for the best. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-experiences-with-natural-disasters/1022615)._