What's Life Like in a Hurricane Hotel
The storm’s immediate reverberations in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey — my turf as a regional correspondent for The Times — were certainly clear. At first, I talked to Puerto Ricans struggling to make contact with family on the island and then about the obligations those from Puerto Rico feel they have to the island, including politicians on the mainland who try to make up for the island’s lack of federal representation and young people guilty over fleeing.
But as I started reporting on a story about the families living in hotel rooms provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which appears on today’s front page, I was struck by how, nearly five months after landfall, the trauma Maria created was still intensifying and metastasizing — reaching all the way to a Red Roof Inn in downtown Hartford.
A sense of restlessness pervaded the hotel. I felt it as soon as I stepped off the elevator. In most of the rooms were families who had fled their homes in Puerto Rico after the devastation of Hurricane Maria and were living in the hotel in Connecticut while they tried to figure out whether they could go back home or would have to start over elsewhere.
I saw a mother in pajamas bouncing her infant daughter in the very lived-in room her family had stayed in since November, every crevice jammed with diapers and snacks and clothes. Children buzzed around from the rooms into the hallways and lobby downstairs, bursting with energy that needed to be burned.
Many of them had spent their weeks looking for jobs or permanent housing, or walked over to a nearby church that had opened up its kitchen for them to cook in. The children went to school. But this was a Friday night, and as they splayed out on beds watching TV, listened to music or played video games, it felt like they were just killing time, one day passing like so many others before it.
They had air-conditioning. They were not waiting for hours in lines for food, water and fuel. They had cable television. Still, the aimlessness that plagued them seemed like an extension of the storm’s trauma.
“It’s not easy for anybody to live like this,” Janette Febres told me in the room where she, her husband and 12-year-old son had shared a bed for months.
I have never traveled to Puerto Rico, before or after Maria. My impressions of how so much had been upended were formed by the stories told by Puerto Ricans, the photographs they showed me, the distress I saw in their lives. On the other hand, my partner on the story, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, who visited a hotel in Queens, was a native of Puerto Rico. He had spent nearly 40 days there reporting after Hurricanes Irma and Maria and had experienced, as he put it, the dire conditions that “disrupted their lives and led thousands to take that leap of faith” to leave behind their homes for the mainland.
My reporting was certainly informed by my own experience with storms. I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Texas. I’ve spent hours packed into a minivan with family and the dog, trying to get a couple of hundred miles away, and spent weeks staying with relatives wondering what I would return to. But the scope of the turmoil and uncertainty these families from Puerto Rico faced was well beyond what I knew.
Luis and I were taken by similar observations of the dilemma these families faced: “Try to make it on the mainland, where many have struggled to find jobs and housing,” Luis said, “or return to Puerto Rico, where stability is still elusive.”
Most of the families he interviewed, he said, “had not yet found what they ultimately left their homeland looking for: a sense of stability.”
Of all the people we met, a young family that Luis found in Queens stuck with me the most. Yanitza Cruz was nearly eight months pregnant; her due date and the expiration date for her family’s FEMA-provided hotel were worryingly close. The family traveled from a remote mountain town to New York using almost all of their savings. Her husband, Joel García, even panhandled.
But they maintained an incredible level of optimism. They talked about getting an apartment in New York, and him finding work as a barber. As most of us in New York groan over subway delays, he was astonished at how he could journey across a metropolis for the swipe of his MetroCard. And the family marveled at the generosity they have been shown.
On a visit to the Puerto Rican Family Institute, they met a maintenance worker who took Mr. García to a department store and bought every member of the family a jacket. He did not even look at the price tags. His name was Nate. “I’m never going to forget you,” Mr. García said he told Nate.
Of all that remained uncertain, he and his wife had settled one thing: When she gives birth next month, they plan to name their son Nate.
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