Lebanon
“The last time I talked to my mother was last Tuesday, just as the hurricane was starting,” said Melissa Lopez-Jackson, a Windsor resident who works in the ophthalmology department at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. “I haven’t heard from her since. I call at least 10 times a day. … Nothing goes through.”
When that last phone conversation happened, Lopez-Jackson said, her 67-year-old mother assured her that she had stocked up on water, and that her home’s hillside location made it unlikely that the home, located about 23 miles from San Juan, would be flooded.
“I know they’re OK,” Lopez-Jackson said, referring to her brother, 26, and her mother. “But I feel helpless. I get up every single day and I have power. I have running water. I have food in my refrigerator. And I know she doesn’t have that. … It breaks my heart.”
On Monday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called on President Donald Trump to deploy the military to help with the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, the Associated Press reported. The hurricane knocked out power throughout the island territory of more than 3 million U.S. citizens, and concerns about access to potable water also have been mounting.
Early Monday morning, five minutes after leaving yet another voicemail message for her mother, Jackson-Lopez’ phone rang with a call from Puerto Rico. She scrambled to answer, but it wasn’t her family— it was her best friend, who was resurfacing after nearly a week of silence to relate her own harrowing tale of evacuating through chest-high water to escape the flood.
“That just made me cry a river,” Lopez-Jackson said.
Lopez-Jackson isn’t the only one anxiously watching for news from the U.S. territory, where officials said on Monday that the damage had set the area’s infrastructure back decades.
Lyme resident Andrea Heitzman sits on the board of the Vieques Humane Society, which over the past five years has sent roughly 250 dogs into the Upper Valley through a partnership with the Lyme Veterinary Hospital, owned by Heitzman’s husband, Tom Heitzman.
Heitzman said that the shelter, located on the northern side of Vieques, was bracing for the storm by bringing roughly 100 dogs, 40 cats, and a rescue horse named JoJo inside to protect them from the elements.
“We have no idea of the condition of the animals,” she said.
She hasn’t heard a word from shelter staff since, and has been coordinating with the Humane Society of the United States to try to get people and supplies into the remote spot.
The shelter is suffering doubly, she said, because it was still reeling from the damage inflicted by the previous hurricane.
“Irma destroyed all of their fencing, parts of their roof, their cistern. Then they lost electricity, basically until two days before Maria. Now they’re in a situation where they have no running water, no electricity and no communication.”
Heitzman has worked to help the shelter with a fundraising drive that had, as of Monday afternoon, received about $30,000 in Paypal donations, with more in pledged checks on the way.
She asked those interested in supporting the relief and rebuilding effort to visit the Vieques Humane Society Facebook page.
About 11,700, or nearly 1 percent, of New Hampshire residents identify as Puerto Rican, according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, and there are another 2,261 Puerto Ricans living in Vermont.
James Van Kirk, owner of Candela Tapas Lounge in Hanover, says he lived through four or five hurricanes while growing up in Puerto Rico.
“My mom, my brother and sisters and whole family is down there,” he said.
Van Kirk has been fortunate enough to have re-established contact with San Juan-based family members after the storm. His brother posted videos online that showed how Maria had ripped the storm shutters off his house and broken the windows, but seemed to have spared the house any structural damage.
Still, Van Kirk, a resident of Lebanon, is worried about what the immediate future holds for his family, particularly his 87-year-old mother.
“There’s been a little looting,” he said. “So many trees are down. There’s so much debris everywhere. People who have money have diesel generators, but it’s hard to get diesel.”
Van Kirk said that, as soon as travel is possible, he plans to bring his mother to the Upper Valley, where she can wait until the power, and other basic public services, are fully restored.
He also plans to host a fundraising dinner at Candela Tapas, though details were not available on Monday afternoon.
Elsewhere in the Upper Valley, Wes Miller was mobilizing resources in a different way — on Friday night, the safety specialist in the Environmental Health & Safety Department at Dartmouth-Hitchcock made the decision that he would put his emergency management training to use by flying to Puerto Rico to help direct relief efforts for the next three weeks.
Miller was at the Lebanon airport early Monday afternoon, checking in for his flight. His wife, pain management physician Janice Gellis, was there to see him off.
“I was so happy for him,” she said, of his success in arranging for the logistics of the effort with the hospital, and the Red Cross. “I know how important this is for him.”
Miller said that he had gotten more interested in emergency management after organizing a Disaster Response Boot Camp Program at Dartmouth, and that the images flowing out of Puerto Rico made him feel that this was the right thing to do.
“The magnitude is of an unprecedented nature,” he said. He had struggled to fit everything into a single carry-on –— he left behind a fourth pair of socks, but decided to keep the folding toothbrush. And only after he connected with other Red Cross volunteers staging in Atlanta would he learn his destination within Puerto Rico.
Miller said that one of the most difficult things would be to walk into the same blackout that was affecting so many others.
“I don’t know what I’ll have in terms of a telephone or email,” he told his wife, shortly before embarking on the plane. “I don’t know when we’ll be able to talk.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.