Back on the stricken island, thousands of desperate refugees clamor for a lifeline to safety in Florida.
ORLANDO—A few times a day, on no particular schedule, a plane pulls up to a gate at the airport here and disgorges a hundred and fifty or more exhausted, anxious, and very often hungry people. Only three hours before, they were among thousands of panicked storm victims, packed into a sweltering airport in San Juan, clamoring for an $800 seat on anything with wings that might ferry them away from the devastation left nine days ago by Hurricane Maria. Now, in the air-conditioned comfort of Concourse D, they are safe in a country that is technically their own, but they are not home.
The halting parade of evacuees that has passed through the Orlando airport over the past week—and through Miami’s airport, too—lacks the visual drama of earlier crises in the Caribbean, when oppression, natural disaster or plain desperation pushed Cubans and Haitians onto crude homemade rafts or into the holds of leaky fishing trawlers. But this is every bit an exodus of that order. The means of escape is not a harrowing ordeal, but what’s being left behind most certainly is. And those lucky enough to get out are not so exhausted that they can’t summon anger at the government officials who they feel paid them less heed than hurricane victims on the mainland.
When Roberto Marquez and his wife Lourdes arrived at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan around 5:30 a.m. on September 25, they found utter chaos. “There were a few thousand people already there,” the 53-year-old attorney said. “There was no power, no ventilation, no cell service and no security guards. Just airline employees sort of winging it.”
The couple had tried to leave Puerto Rico before Hurricane Maria slammed into the island five days earlier, but were unable to find available seats. After the storm with its 155-mile-per-hour winds passed, Marquez was able to reach his sister in Florida, who booked two tickets on a Southwest Airlines flight scheduled to depart on September 22. It was cancelled because the airport had not reopened. Two days later, when a few flights resumed, Marquez and his spouse drove to the airport. “We had to physically be there in order to get on a list for a flight on Monday,” he said. “On Monday, we were told to get in a long line of people who were being picked to get on a plane on a first-come, first-served basis.”
After waiting for nearly four hours, the Marquezes boarded a Southwest jet that was supposed to depart for Orlando at 9:30 a.m. The flight didn’t take off for another two hours. Marquez estimates the plane carried 166 passengers, including dozens of elderly people and unaccompanied children. “There was an old lady who had an oxygen mask and needed dialysis,” Marquez said. “The man sitting in front of me was a renal patient. And I counted seven children who were 2-years-old or younger.”
Marquez’s sister picked them up and drove them 90 miles to Tampa, where the couple intend to stay indefinitely. “My plan is to work from Tampa for as long as I can,” Marquez said. “To be honest, things were pretty bad in Puerto Rico before Maria hit us. I don’t know if I am going back.”
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Puerto Rico’s exodus begins with a trickle into Orlando https://t.co/sEXAJjCZpZ via @politicomag pic.twitter.com/wj38qMlUGd
— POLITICO (@politico) September 30, 2017
Oh boy! More freeloaders to take advantage of taxpayer-funded resources. I was in Puerto Rico some years ago. The place was a dump . Just wait till they, like the illegals and alleged refugees, start ruining our cities too.
Knew it. It was inevitable they’d end up here.
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