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‘It’s a catastrophe’

Warren native helping recovery efforts with US Army Corps of Engineers

Hurricane Maria caused massive damage to Puerto Rico’s electrical infrastructure, including knocking down or snapping many of the utility poles on the island. Since Hurricane Maria struck the island, the Corps of Engineers handled, and continues to handle, a number of problems in Puerto Rico, including power outages, debris, and damage to houses and other buildings.

There were tearful thank-yous and shouts of joy when the power finally came back on in a small restaurant in Puerto Rico.

Shawn Castro of Warren was deployed to Puerto Rico by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria.

Castro’s day job with the Corps of Engineers is at Kinzua Dam.

Since late summer, Castro has spent about 75 days as a Corps of Engineers quality assurance representative.

In August, Castro and the Pittsburgh-based team he is a part of were sent to Texas to deal with the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey.

They oversaw the placement and continued operation of generators for critical infrastructure locations — hospitals, care facilities, water and sewage treatment plants, and, later, communications facilities, and police and fire departments.

“Texas was eye-opening,” Castro said. “Structurally, Aransas Pass and Rockport got smoked. There were houses that were just piles of sticks.”

“The people were amazing, though,” he said.

“This woman came up to us and said, ‘Do you need anything?'” he said.

“I said, ‘Ma’am, we’re here to help you.'”

“She said, ‘We’re Texans. We got this. But we appreciate it.'”

After about a month “we closed the mission to Texas,” Castro said.

“We were pulling generators from Texas and sending them toward Florida because we knew two more hurricanes were coming,” Castro said.

One of the hurricanes veered from its projected path and the Corps’ staging area was no longer suitable. The equipment had to be moved again. “That’s part of what made it logistically so difficult,” he said.

At the end of September, Castro came home. His 30-day deployment was up.

The work was not over, it was just being done by someone else.

“We had teams on the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico when the storms hit,” he said.

Still, most of the equipment resources were tied up in the southern states, and even the available equipment was not in ideal locations. “We couldn’t stage in Florida, as close as possible,” because the storms were still hitting or expected to hit there, he said.

Castro’s second deployment was to Puerto Rico. It is generally three to five years between deployments.

He flew to San Juan on Oct. 29.

He saw a different situation that the one in Texas.

While Texas towns were flattened, “structurally, the buildings were better off” in Puerto Rico, he said.

The most serious problem there was the electrical generation and distribution system. “The grid that they had had not been maintained,” he said.

Solar fields and windmills were destroyed. Poles — even reinforced concrete ones — were snapped.

Puerto Rico posed different challenges than Texas and the rest of the continental United States where resources can be driven to the area of need.

In Texas, “you’d see miles of nothing but bucket trucks doing nothing but putting up lines,” Castro said. “We could send all the linemen in the world down to Puerto Rico, but without bucket trucks what would they do? Without utility poles what would they do?”

The Corps of Engineers ordered utility poles, but stockpiles were exhausted “We’d used so many in Texas they were making them,” Castro said.

Puerto Rico uses a mix of wood, steel, and some reinforced concrete utility poles. “A lot of (the concrete poles) withstood the Category 5,” Castro said. People were asking why more of the concrete poles couldn’t be put up.

Castro said the island doesn’t make concrete. “They have to be made here and shipped over,” he said.

He witnessed the progress.

“When I got there, there wasn’t a light on,” Castro said. “Every day, you’d see more lights on.”

“They have a positive outlook and they all had Christmas spirit,” he said. “You’d see Christmas lights as soon as power went on.”

Repairing the grid is up to other Corps teams. Castro’s work focused on keeping power flowing to critical facilities.

His job was to drive from one generator to the next making sure there were no maintenance nor fuel problems.

Sometimes, he could see 30 generators in a day. Road conditions and the remote placement of some of the generators often cut that number down dramatically. “These generators might only be 15 miles apart, but this one is on top of one mountain and this one is on top of another,”

With so much damage in so many places — from Texas to Florida to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico — there was a shortage of the specialized generators — from relatively small, but still delivering about 20 times the wattage of a typical home generator, to tractor-trailer sized — used by the Corps. “They were calling manufacturers of generators to see how fast they could make generators,” Castro said. “They were looking in Canada, also.”

Despite the tropical surroundings, it wasn’t a vacation. There were no days off. Castro was putting in 12 or more hours every day, seven days a week. “Most of what we see is from the top of a mountain or as we’re driving,” he said.

To the people who ask ‘How was the beach?’, Castro said he shows a picture of some sand in the dark. “It was the same every night,” he said.

He was deployed over Thanksgiving. “There was a Ruth’s Chris Steak House where I was,” Castro said. “That’s where I ate Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Then I ate MREs (meals ready to eat) for three days after that,” he said.

During the last few weeks of his 45-day deployment to Puerto Rico, Castro was taking the ferry to the Puerto Rican island Vieques.

There are hundreds of generators on Puerto Rico, but the Corps only had to set up 18 on Vieques, including at the hospital, the airport, and the main water supplies. Much of the island is a wildlife preserve.

He was such a regular that two of the wild horses that roam the island ate from his hand on the last day — one of them going to the trouble of sticking its head inside the vehicle for an apple.

One day, when they missed the ferry to return from Vieques, Castro and the man he was working with had to spend a few extra hours on the island. “We went in to get something to eat,” he said. “We were sitting on the dock and we heard people screaming and yelling.”

“The owner came out and said power was on,” Castro said. “This one lady was yelling down at us crying because she finally had power.”

It had been two-and-a-half-months.

Castro has pictures of hand-drawn thank-yous from local children.

“We came into work one day and school kids had put these all over our office,” he said.

The effort to bring the grid back up and stable could take several more months and Castro expects the next hurricane season to come around while the Corps is still working.

“It’s a catastrophe,” he said. “There’s so much hardship. The media sounds like nobody’s doing anything. But there’s so much going on.”

He came home on Dec. 21 and expects to be deployed again soon. “They had about 65 percent power when I left,” Castro said.“It’s worthwhile to see it through.”

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