When Roy Gillespie says Puerto Rico currently faces “the worst infrastructure devastation” he has ever seen, he speaks as someone who has seen a wide variety of infrastructure devastation.
Gillespie, who is human rights commissioner for Teamsters Joint Council 13 in St. Louis, is a disaster-relief first responder for the Teamsters in partnership with the American Red Cross. He has coordinated disaster-relief logistics in the aftermath of hurricanes (Katrina, Wilma), tornadoes (in Joplin; Romeoville, Illinois; Jeffersonville, Indiana), floods (in St. Louis County; Cedar Rapids, Iowa) and California wildfires.
“I’ve been all over this island,” Gillespie told The St. Louis American by phone from San Juan on Sunday, October 15, “and almost everywhere I go, there is no drinking water or electricity. All the main power poles, all the transmission lines, are down. Pole after pole after pole is broken or snapped, and the lines are all mangled. This island will have no electricity for the foreseeable future.”
The fact that it’s an island compounds the problems.
“On the mainland, we’d have thousands of trucks from all over driving in and out of here, but we’d have to transport a lot of trucks here before we could even get all the downed poles and mangled lines cleaned up.”
He is working with a small fleet of eight 28-foot boxed trucks and 112 volunteer Teamsters, mostly from New York and New Jersey, and mostly with family on the island. Gillespie is the only paid Teamsters staff on the ground, and he has been working 16- and 18-hour days for a week and half while being compensated for 8-hour days.
As of Sunday afternoon, even the Teamsters were out of bottled water and waiting for a new shipment from FEMA. The local response to FEMA’s efforts, he said, was universal: “not enough.” He expected a delivery of water from an off-shore barge soon.
“But you could fly in thousands of planes with water, and until they get their electricity and water infrastructure up and running, it wouldn’t be enough,” he said.
Saturday, October 14 was a typical day. Gillespie and a team trucked water, food, baby formula and cleanup supplies into an area he identified as Deacos. He was struck by a group of girls whose mother had put them in “pretty party dresses” to wait with her for supplies.
“The girls were crying,” he said. “They had not had water or milk for five days. We stayed two hours until we ran out of stuff to give away.”
Everywhere they deliver supplies, he said, they find people waiting for them. People also line up in front of stores that are open. On Sunday he passed a Wal-Mart in San Juan where the line to enter was three blocks long. He called The American from the largest shopping mall in San Juan, where it took him an hour to park, it was so busy with people seeking water, cell phone reception and air-conditioning.
Gillespie went to the mall for the same reasons. He has been sleeping in a cot in a hallway at the Coliseum, an indoor arena with no electricity, so no air conditioning. The meals have all been beans and rice. When he has found a restaurant open, he has been served the bare bones of meals, since no one has things like lettuce, tomatoes or cheese.
“Food is not plentiful,” he said. “Though I am very aware when I am helping people that I am in a whole lot better condition than they are.”
He has not been making friends, however, like many of his volunteers. “I don’t want to make and leave friends here because I’d be worried to death about them,” he said. “I would never know what was happening to them. I don’t see power coming back here any time soon.”
The lack of electricity to power televisions and recharge cell phones means that people in Puerto Rico mostly have not heard the insulting, heartless remarks made by President Donald Trump about these Americans in distress.
“That’s the lucky part for him,” Gillespie said of Trump.
Gillespie did bring up Trump’s comments with a FEMA staffer.
“You know when you look at a person and they roll their eyes to show you they’re not happy?” Gillespie said. “But all they’d say was, ‘No comment. I need my job.’”
