An Interview With Dr. Braulio Quintero Of ISER-Caribe

What follows is an interview with Dr. Braulio A. Quintero, co-founder of ISER-Caribe, a research and civic engagement non-profit located in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. The organization is leading an effort to restore coral reefs around the island and in the Caribbean. Braulio is also an organic farmer. This interview centers around the impacts of Hurricane Fiona. The interview took place on Saturday, September 23^rd, a few days after the hurricane hit.

Bali, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with us. First of all, can you tell us where you’re located right now?

I am in the southwest part of the island of Puerto Rico, in the town of Cabo Rojo. We are on the southwest corner of the island.

Readers might be interested in knowing more about the kind of work your organization is doing, and also how you have been impacted by Hurricane Fiona.

Our organization is called the Institute for Social-Ecological Research and for the past five years, my wife and co-founder Stacey M. Williams, who is a marine ecologist, has been leading a program for ecological restoration of coral reefs, using coral and urchin land-based nurseries. The program is based out of the Marine Sciences Department of the University of Puerto Rico in La Parguera, which is located here in the southwest. I also have an organic farm that I operate from our house.

As far as the Hurricane, the southwest was the part of the island where the eye of Hurricane Fiona came through. Stacey’s infrastructure, her coral nurseries, and sea urchin nurseries, which are the main source of restoration material, got a direct hit from the hurricane. There is some good news. Some of the small corals that are growing and being cultured inside, those survived. In terms of the farm, I lost produce. I lost a well pump. I lost my greenhouse. My hen house got flooded, so I had to build a new henhouse temporarily. There was less impact here at the farm, and a bigger impact at the research station where we have our coral restoration project.

But those are just material things, nothing that cannot be replaced. Luckily, none of the team members have had serious injuries. So the emotional scars will heal and the material stuff will be replaced, and we’ll continue our mission doing ecological restoration projects here in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.

Do you have thoughts about what could have been done differently, or what could be done now to better prepare for future storms?

Fuel supplies. There’s a shortage of diesel. A lot of the communications systems right now are running on generators, and these generators need diesel. I read on the news this morning that a tanker anchored several miles off the coast of Peñuelas, off the south coast of Puerto Rico. It came to replenish and fill up the storage tanks up in the Peñuelas petrochemical complex. But it is just sitting there. You would have thought that Hurricane Maria would have taught people that we have to improve our port system, but things didn’t improve.

Then there is the response to the roads. Our roads have not improved in five years, even though money was allocated to agencies. And water. There’s a main reservoir of water in San Juan, Lago Carraizo. In five years, they couldn’t dredge it to increase the capacity of water reserves. So there are multiple things that haven’t been done in the five years since Maria, and that translates to an awful response now.

How are people feeling psychologically?

Our emotional state, the collective psyche, is very beat up. I can talk personally from my situation going through a major hurricane five years ago. It creates a very charged environment. We haven’t lost loved ones, but we have lost property. As far as the island collectively, I would say I’ve seen other people mad. They are crying. They are sad. People are starting to share their emotions more freely because we went through this already. I think people are more ready to deal with it now, because we’ve already been through it once.

Is your institute involved in any of the recovery efforts?

Currently, one of our co-founders, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, is in New York. Ryan is an anthropology professor at the City University of New York. He’s coordinating a lot of efforts out of New York City right now. Next week, I’ll get inserted more into this process, and I’ll start coordinating on the ground what we’re going to be doing as an organization. I don’t want to say we are victims, but we were affected by the hurricane too, so we had to deal with our personal issues first.

How has the U.S. federal government response been? Are you seeing any signs of help coming from the U.S. federal government, or is it mostly the Puerto Rican government?

The response is at three levels: local, Puerto Rican, and federal. If we talk about the federal response, the federal government issued an emergency declaration, and that excluded the southwest region of Puerto Rico. That emergency declaration is based on the information that towns provide to FEMA. When the government released a map of the regions included in the federal emergency declaration, that map showed that the southwest region had been excluded, as well as some other towns from the western part of Puerto Rico, and a county metro area called Loíza.

I understand the bureaucratic process, that the correct information has to be relayed to the federal government. But I think they could have left the bureaucracy for another day and just had a blanket declaration for the whole island. That would have been the humane thing to do instead of doing the technocratic thing, which angered a lot of people.

In terms of the Puerto Rican response, we went through Maria once already and there were no backup plans for diesel refueling or recharging diesel tanks out here. It seems like the government didn’t learn anything from Hurricane Maria to improve the response. So there’s a lot of little details that you would have thought that in five years could have been made better, but they haven’t. You know government inefficiencies. Government ineffectiveness. Playing more the political game than actually doing projects on the ground. It’s been five years of playing politics with the catastrophe. Agile local government is more efficient.

Can you tell us more of the background on the tanker situation? Because we know that Puerto Rican shipments must come from U.S. ships and that in certain situations that requirement has been relaxed.

The law that applies to ports here is called the Jones Act and from what I know right now the Jones Act has not been canceled temporarily because of the emergency. The government has even said that we don’t want humanitarian aid from other islands around us, because we don’t want to have a situation at the ports. So right now, we depend on ships that come from Florida. But they are going to receive a hit from Hurricane Ian soon, or Tropical Storm Ian. And the federal government still hasn’t relaxed the Jones Act.

[Update: Since speaking with Braulio, the BP tanker received a waiver from the Jones Act, specific to that ship. The waiver came after waiting more than a week after submitting an initial request. Hurricane Ian came through Florida earlier this week, causing extensive damage in places like Fort Myers.]

So what do you think is the best thing that Puerto Rico can do to be prepared for the next hurricane?

In terms of electricity and fuel, I think we should move seriously to electrification of transportation, housing, and commerce through renewable energy and not depend on fossil fuels, or at least decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. We should not make this a political show, but rather an actual country project, an island project to move us forward. We need a government and private industry that really want to move us there. I think it’s about social justice, and it’s about environmental justice. I don’t think philanthropy is most important right now. We need concrete actions that will deliver environmental justice, social justice, and energy justice to people.

What can people do to help the situation there?

Those interested in donating should do the research and vet the organizations very well to whom they are giving. After Hurricane Maria, donations were flowing to organizations that ended up pocketing the money, or not doing the work. Corruption happened. If folks in the U.S. can get in contact with Puerto Rican diaspora organizations, and donate through them, that would be my suggestion right now.

We also need people to come to Puerto Rico, to work and to become part of the community. Not just come to benefit from the tax laws that exist. Americans sometimes come here chasing the tax benefits awarded by Act 60-2019, which exempts them from paying income and capital gains taxes. These resident investors speculate on housing, and actually do more harm than good. We need people to come here to work, to pay taxes, to become part of the reconstruction effort, not part of a tax haven scheme that doesn’t help anybody.

Lastly, what’s next for your organization?

Right now, we are giving out resources during the emergency. That is a top priority. However, if we’re going to improve the situation on the island, we need to have long term solutions. As an organization, the Institute for Socio-Ecological Research, we’re going be working on rural electrification that is decentralized and based on renewable generation and storage. I am also very interested in drinking water science and small scale urban agriculture. On the other hand, we are also assisting folks in the Dominican Republic with their reconstruction process. Ryan’s family is from the Dominican Republic, so he has focused part of his efforts within the organization towards raising funds for and collaborating with organizations in the Dominican Republic. In part, that’s why we call ourselves ISER-Caribe, because we see the Caribbean as one place. We see the Caribbean as one region, and we cannot forget that we have island neighbors that also suffer from the impacts of these kinds of storms.

Anna Broughel of the Clean Energy Leadership Institute and Johns Hopkins University contributed to this report.