Hurricane Maria

Diego J. Gonzalez

Prof. Cynthia Pittman

Class: English 3103-134

Date: 30 November 2017

Hurricane Maria

This is an essay about my experience and my learned lessons from hurricane Maria. I would like to start with what happened before Maria, we were hit by another hurricane called Irma, but this one did not hit us directly it passed by closely but still did some damage. We were without power for about two days, but once it came back life was resumed normally. But after about two weeks from hurricane Irma we were announced that will be hit by another hurricane called Maria and that this one would enter Puerto Rico and heavily affect us. This caused some hysteria in the island but it was well deserved as this was a natural disaster like nothing we had never seen before. In my home, we proceeded to take safety actions and bought large amount of bottle water and things to protect our apartment like wood panels so the wind and the water would not affect us.

After everything was covered and protected, we were prepared for the hurricane and all that was left to do was wait until it passed. The hurricane began to hit us heavily at about 5 am there was a tremendous amount of rain falling and the sound of the raging gusts of Maria were just terrifying, enough to wake me up from my sleep. As I woke up I realized that we had lost power and running water, my father entered my room and ask me to help me secure the balcony a little more to avoid any damages since he didn’t expect that this hurricane to be so strong, I help him push the couch against the glass sliding door and that made the sound a lot less and we felt a lot safer. For the rest of the hurricane I mostly slept and listened to the radio for any updates on what was going on and to see if there were any flood warnings in our area which thankfully there wasn’t. At about 1 pm things started to calm down and I was able to go outside and see what had happened, once I got dressed properly and stepped outside I could not believe what I was seeing all of my surroundings were almost completely destroyed.

I began to look around and everything was almost unrecognizable, trees has fallen, roofs were detached from their houses, streets signs were detached from the ground, and there was water absolutely everywhere. We decided to stay in for the day and not leave our complex for our own safety, the next day we went out to see the damages and how far we could make it without the road being blocked by natural debris caused by Maria. We found that there were electricity posts everywhere in the street and that all of them were blocking the streets and made it difficult for people to get to their destinations. We also began to see massively long lines at gas stations and super markets for people who were lacking gasoline and the other who were running out of food and first aid items like batteries and flashlights that would be necessary for the coming months. Our trip turned out to be rather short since my mother wanted to returned because she was very sad to see all the destruction and chaos caused by this devastating hurricane, but it was also the correct thing to do since for the time being the road was not a good place to be unless it was one hundred percent necessary.

  As for the next two months after Maria hit Puerto Rico I learned a lot of things that I could say made me a little more human to put it in words. I learned that I had neighbors who I had not seen in a very long tome and they had also grown up the same way I did. I learned to be more patience and to wait in very long lines for things that I would normally not have to wait for it like gasoline and groceries. I also learned to live without power or running water, cooking in a gas stove, washing my clothes by hand with and playing cards and board games and hardest of all I learned to shower with cold water and with buckets because we had no running water or heater. These are the things that I learned from Maria, some of these things ate very useful and I will probably continue to use them for the rest of my life, but overall this was a very hard and sad experience and I really hope that I do not have to relive something like this ever again.

Work References: Diego Gonzalez narrative essay hurricane class assignment 30 November 2017