New 5.9 Earthquake Rattles Puerto Rico, Causing More Power Outages

GUÁNICA, P.R. — Not long after José Méndez Marrero, a civil engineer, arrived on Saturday to inspect the damage at a Puerto Rican town crippled by a big earthquake, the ground beneath him groaned. Again.

The woman he had been chatting with on the street began to run into her house.

“No, señora!” he hollered behind her. “To the plaza!”

It was another scary one — a 5.9-magnitude aftershock, on the 15th day since tremors large and small began terrorizing southern Puerto Rico. The quake stunned the island just as signs of life, like trucks selling fresh fruit on the side of the road, had started to return. Now there were more power outages, more cracked buildings, more feelings of dread that the worst of the shaking was, somehow, not yet over.

“Too much,” declared Israel Vélez Irizarry, 49, as he sought shelter in his 1993 Chevrolet Lumina parked outside his aunt’s house. The items inside — pillows, blankets, toys — told the tale of the nights he, his mother, his wife and their three children, ages 3, 7 and 8, had spent waiting for the trembling to end.

“We haven’t been able to shower or anything,” Mr. Vélez said. “It shakes and it shakes — and it looks like it wants to keep going.”

His wife, Desirée Rodríguez, 33, loaded a suitcase into the trunk of the car. They planned to fly on Sunday to Kentucky, to stay with Mr. Vélez’s oldest son.

Even before Saturday’s major aftershock, which fissured more roads and prompted more landslides, Puerto Rico estimated damages from a 6.4-magnitude quake on Tuesday at $110 million. Gov. Wanda Vázquez asked the federal government on Saturday to approve a major disaster declaration, which would clear the way for additional federal assistance, including funds for temporary housing. President Trump approved an initial emergency declaration last week.

“We need to stay calm,” Ms. Vázquez said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon. “This was expected.”

For Mr. Méndez and some two-dozen members of the Puerto Rico Engineers and Surveyors Association who gathered in downtown Guánica, near the epicenter of the quakes, the violent quake on Saturday prompted Félix Rivera Arroyo, president of the association’s earthquake commission, to issue a stern reminder: No going inside buildings. Visual observations only, an initial inspection to guide future work.

Mr. Rivera’s cellphone kept ringing. Emergency managers from towns like Mayagüez and Aguadilla called asking for expert help.

The engineers moved gingerly on the deserted streets among downed power lines and crumbled bits of sidewalk. Guánica’s old City Hall looked pretty good. Its new one was roped off with yellow tape, with part of the building lying about two inches lower than the rest, the engineers estimated. They examined a worrying crack in the surrounding asphalt.

A dead iguana lay nearby. A rooster crowed. Mr. Méndez kept moving his small group away from two-story buildings, power lines and poles and into the streets.

“This is brutal,” said Erasto Garcia, one of the engineers. “I had never seen this, ever.”

Behind City Hall were the ruins of the pancaked Agripina Seda middle school. From afar, it looked to the engineers like the damage might have been caused by the so-called short column effect, a construction problem that Mr. Rivera said he had seen in other collapsed schools in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Venezuela. Mr. Méndez noted that the school was on higher ground and wondered if it had been built on unstable fill.

Puerto Ricans will have to prepare for lengthy inspections different from the ones they are used to after hurricanes, cautioned another engineer, Marilú De La Cruz. “There has been so much disinformation about past inspections that are completely irrelevant” to seismic activity, she said.

Elizabeth Vanacore, a seismologist with the Puerto Rico Seismic Network, said tremors would continue for at least a few more weeks. She said the many aftershocks were a sign that the island’s multiple faults may have started activating one another. Smaller quakes were so frequent on Saturday that the engineers and residents stopped telling each other every time they felt one. Several people said they had spent much of the past week with a dull headache or mild dizziness.

In spite of the strong morning aftershock, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the strapped public utility, said about 96 percent of its roughly 1.4 million customers had electricity. More than 6,000 people are still sleeping outside their homes, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, about half in outdoor government shelters and half in improvised camps.

Nongovernmental organizations set up 19 mobile feeding sites. Mayors from less affected towns were bringing in help, and the National Guard pitched tents and distributed adult and baby diapers, wipes, juice and insect repellent.

But much of the assistance on Saturday came directly from other Puerto Ricans, which set out in small convoys and crammed the highway south from San Juan, the capital, and other parts of the island.

Fifteen members of the extended Ruiz family from Cabo Rojo woke up at 6 a.m. to cook 160 meals of rice and chicken in Raymond Ruiz’s food truck. They packed it in Styrofoam containers, encased them in plastic wrap and drove to the La Luna neighborhood in Guánica, intent on helping people who were making do away from the major shelters.

“Here, my love, God bless you,” Heidy García, 45, one of the family members, said as she delivered the meal and a cold water bottle to María Santiago Lamboy, 82.

“You are saints,” responded Ms. Santiago, who has been sleeping in her car since Dec. 28.

Once they were done at the camp, the family drove uphill, going house to house asking people if they were hungry or thirsty. They crossed paths with a white pickup truck — Sister Julia and Sister Juliana, Dominican nuns in full habit who said their convent had lost two houses. They had still managed to cook a vat of paella on the patio.

Some evacuees, like Luis Quiles Medina, 69, had tears in their eyes as they spoke of their prolonged anxiety over the quakes. “I’m trying, but this just rattles the nerves,” he said. “It’s not easy.”

In a driveway of another house, the Ruiz family held a prayer circle with three families. They, too, wept.

“I’m not scared of the tremor,” said Mara González, 46, who left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and returned just six months ago. “I’m scared of not seeing my grandchildren again.”

As the sun set in the nearby town of Guayanilla, the parish celebrated its first Mass since Tuesday, when the major quake crumbled most of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. More than 50 members of the congregation gathered on brown metal folding chairs under white tents by the side of the church.

“We are fine physically, but emotionally, we are not,” said Luz Torres, 52, tearing up ahead of the Mass. “This has changed our lives.”

The quakes have made their island feel unfamiliar, betrayed their sense of reality.

“We’ve moved to California,” the Rev. Adalín Rivera Sáez, the vicar who led the Mass, joked in a rare moment of levity.

“Someone told me this week, ‘They changed our little island,’” he added. “The little island is the same. We are just in different circumstances. We have to live with that.”

When the aftershocks come — and there will be some, he emphasized — Father Rivera advised his congregation to pray, and also duck and cover.

“Now,” he concluded, “let’s give each other a big hug.”

Edmy Ayala contributed reporting from San Juan, P.R.; Frances Robles from Miami; and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York.

Read More