We found a man on the outskirts of town. He waved at us from the top of a small apartment complex, trying to yell, but his voice didn’t work anymore. He looked to be about eighty years old. I couldn’t see that then, exactly how old he was, but I’ve learned the general look of geriatrics. We stopped on the side of the road and yelled back up at him that it was okay and we were going to get him.
His apartment complex had been crushed on the side and was not stable. It was only two stories. The ceilings had come crashing down on the interior and blocked the staircase. I don’t know how it was still standing. We couldn’t get up through inside of the building itself.
I could hear him trying to yell at us for help. “Heeeeehhh Heeeeehhhh.” His voice had just been completely thrashed.
“Call San Juan,” Ranee said.
Craig called on the satphone. He got through to Brian, but Brian said there was nothing he could do right now. I said to Craig, “Call Brian’s boss at FEMA.” I said, “Call the Army.” We didn’t know who the hell to call. We just dialed Brian again, and nobody answered.
“What are we going to do?” Latisha said. She looked really tired and wiped her eyes with her hands, until she remembered about infection.
I looked over at the much taller, four-story stucco building next to the one where the guy was. It was crushed too. But it had some black metal balconies sticking out from the side. These balconies were so close to the old guy’s apartment complex that they were in an almost jumpable distance. I thought that maybe I could climb up those balconies and then somehow scramble to the other building’s roof. It was only two or three stories to reach level with it. It’d be like Spiderman. Like parkour. You had to be creative out there.
“No,” Craig said, when I told him my plan. You know, a man. But the victim was still trying to scream at us, and I said fuck it.
I ran over to the side of the building with the balconies and started to climb up, from floor to floor, from the outside. I’m in good shape, thankfully. I lift weights, and I do trail running. I do yoga. Not that it helped me much.
I climbed up to one of the first-floor balconies. It was wrought metal, black, and very slick from the water. I clambered up and jumped down into it. It was fine. And then it turned out that there was a little fire exit extending from the second floor’s balcony to the first, and so I climbed up that, even though it had been broken in the storm. I grappled onto the little steps, but the fire exit swayed almost all the way out, and I thought I’d come crashing down.
The nurses below were all yelling at me, and I thought, Yeah, maybe not a great idea.
But I hooked my foot onto the second balcony railing and swung the fire exit back. I hopped into the little balcony. It didn’t feel very stable. It creaked. But from there I had a good view of the roof of the two-story building where the old man was stranded. I could see that he needed immediate crisis care. He had this old shriveled face. His hair came down over his eyes. He was hurt.
His whole left side was just red. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on. But from the position of the leg I could see it had broken. And he had some serious hematoma and lacerations. Exterior wounds of that size mean a good chance of internal bleeding too. He must have fallen or had something topple on top of him. I don’t know how he made it to the roof. He had crawled over it to scream at us from the edge.
I could see him, pretty close. I could see his eyes. He didn’t have animal eyes like the lady. He had the kind of eyes that terminal patients get when it sinks in and they know they have to get ready. The light goes out of them.
I yelled when I saw that. I said, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!”
He nodded and laid his head down on the ground.
“Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” I’m yelling. “I’m coming to get you!”
I couldn’t hop to the roof from the second balcony. From that height, there was a good chance I’d just hit the wall and have to grab the edges with my fingers. The third balcony up rose higher than the top of his building. I could do a long jump down from there maybe. But when I grabbed up at the third balcony’s ironworks, it shook loose from the stucco. Then it just collapsed. It popped out from the top, swung all the way down, and then hung toward the ground from one rivet. I had to duck because it almost knocked my head off. I started trembling then. I knew I was a complete tool with no idea what I was doing.
“Sindy!” they’re all yelling down there.
“It’s fine!” I yelled back. It wasn’t fine. I couldn’t jump from building to building. I’m not Spiderman and I don’t do parkour. Also the balcony I stood in was creaking and shaking.
I looked across at the other building, at the man, who still lay down on the roof by the edge, trying to raise his hand at me. I looked at his eyes, at the red on his skin and clothes all down the left side. On the part of his rooftop I could see, there was a red stain around his body. I didn’t know how long he had been there, but the bone can set wrong, and there is a serious problem with bacterial infection, septicemia, in those conditions.
He looked at me again and shook his head. I could see him really well. That’s how close I was. But not close enough to get to him. We looked at each other for a long time.
Then he started shuffling. He tried to scream I guess from the pain but couldn’t. He was rummaging through his pocket with his good hand. He took something out of his pocket and dropped it from the roof into the shallow water below. I heard it plop.
“He dropped something!” I yelled.
“I got it,” I heard Ranee say.
“I have to get down,” I said to man.
He didn’t say anything to me. He laid completely flat on the roof, and then I couldn’t see him as well.
“Just wait here,” I said. “We’ll send someone for you.”
He still just didn’t say anything.
“We’ll send somebody,” I said.
I climbed down.
We got back in the Rambler and drove away. Craig drove, and Latisha sat in the front. Ranee put a blanket over me.
“What did he throw down?” I said.
Ranee had put it inside her rubber pants and fished it out. It was a small, soaked square object. She handed it to me.
It was his wallet. I opened up and saw his identification cards. He was smart. It had his address, his location.
His name was Antonio Hernandez.
As soon as we got to San Juan, I tracked down Brian, and I was like, “This guy needs our help. He lives here.” I showed Brian the address. “We need to call the Army,” I said. “We need FEMA. We have to get the police.”
Brian took the wallet that I handed him. He said he’d write the guy’s name down. “I’ll let our team know,” he said.
“No, you don’t understand that we need to get him now,” I said. I explained about the hematomas and the balconies.
Brian took off his glasses and cleaned them with his shirt, from under his FEMA slicker. He tilted his head at a line of people who were waiting for I don’t know what. The line was so long I couldn’t see where it ended.
“We’ll do what we can do,” he said. “But we have our hands full.”
“You need to listen to me! This is an emergency!”
Brian walked away.
Later, that night, in our hotel, I got so mad. I realized that if I could just somehow get a hold of rescue equipment or some people myself, I could go save Mr. Hernandez before he died. I could get a ladder, like the one I’d used to help the woman and the dogs.
I just lay there all night thinking of his whole left side that had been turned red from the hematoma and the cuts. I thought of his eyes. Thought how stupid I’d been to just give his information to Brian and then expect a miracle. I had to do it myself.
Thing was, I couldn’t remember exactly how to get back to the apartment in Toa Baja. I tried to track it in my mind but couldn’t. I called Craig about it, in the middle of the night. He said that he didn’t know how exactly to track back either, because we’d been g
oing all over the place without a plan. So I called Latisha and Ranee, but they didn’t know either.
“Didn’t Brian say they’d get him?” Ranee said into the phone, sleepy.
What I needed was that wallet. With the wallet and the ID card, I’d plug in the address using GPS.
I got up the next morning, and it was raining. I prepared by putting on my rubber pants and my slicker, so when I got Mr. Hernandez’s information, I could just get a car and go. After that, I started running everywhere looking for Brian. The mother and child clinic, the Coliseum, the historical district. When I found him, around three o’clock in the afternoon in the cantina, I started hollering at him that I needed the wallet. He was like, “What are you talking about?” Then he remembered. He said, “I gave that to So-and-So.” A supervisor. He said, “They’ll take care of it when they can.”
I said, “Just give it back to me, and I’ll get a car and a ladder. I’ll get supplies. I’ll go up there myself.”
Brian looked at me sort of sympathetically. “I can see this is getting to you,” he said.
“Just give me the wallet back,” I said.
He put his arm around me and gave a little tug on the FEMA slicker I wore. “You’ve done really great work here. You’ve been such an incredible part of the team.”
We stood by a pile of sandwiches wrapped up in plastic, but in my mind I saw the long lines with the people sleeping standing up and the FEMA guys handing out applications. I said, “No, I’m doing something different. We went up to the mountains.”
“Every little bit helps,” Brian said.
“I’m not part of this,” I said. “We went up to Toa Baja, and I have to get back.”
Brian looked at me and said, “Sorry, I’m coming. I’ll be right there.”
“What?” I said.
“I have a meeting,” he said, getting suddenly busy. He’d been talking to his Bluetooth.
“His name’s Antonio Hernandez,” I said.
“I know, thank you, good,” Brian said. He took off again.
He never got back to me about the wallet. I must have called him six or seven more times, but he didn’t answer.
Two days later it was time for us to leave.
I heard that the president said that the death toll was sixteen. He was like, this is a really impressive number.
Later, there were some studies, by Harvard and George Washington Universities.
Those estimates said that eight hundred to eight thousand people died in Puerto Rico, mostly from “interruptions in medical care.” That just means that they didn’t get seen by surgeons or doctors or nurses. Fewer people died from drowning, or direct impacts.
So I went home. I came home to my husband and my daughter.
They looked so crazily happy to see me that at first it was okay. At the airport, my daughter crawled all over me and got too excited, so I had to sing to her so she’d stop screaming. My husband wrapped me up in his arms and then drove us all back to the house. I slept in the car, and when I woke up, we were there.
Our place looked like a palace, I swear.
I slept in our bed. It was good to be back. Like the other wasn’t real almost. My husband cooked me eggs and pizza. I was just so grateful to have my family. My daughter showed me some pictures she’d taken while I was away. They were of flowers and grass.
I told my family about the woman with the little dogs and how I’d held her by the butt and saved her Chihuahuas by basically swimming through the house. My daughter liked that. I told my husband, later, at night, about the man and his daughter in the floodwater and how we’d treated their wounds and given them Cipro. I talked about how FEMA stayed in San Juan while we went to the mountains in that Rambler and how we’d had to pick up the fallen cables with the electric sparks. I drank a lot of wine and went on and on about it. How the old woman at the airport had kissed my hand and blah blah. I told my husband all of the stories except for the one about the man on the roof. And he, my husband, was really, really proud of me.
The problem was that after a few days I started to feel like just lying down on the floor and not getting back up. I got this idea that Brian had been right, when he’d said that I was “part of the team.” He’d hinted to me that I didn’t count as some special superhero. I hadn’t wanted to hear that at the time, when I was yelling at him about Toa Baja. But after a few days of telling my stories and eating my husband’s cooking, I saw that he had a point.
Because I didn’t speak Spanish. I let myself feel all puffed up when that old lady kissed my hand just because I gave her a couple little bottles of penicillin. Me thinking that I’m righting some wrong, sort of resisting the political crap. But the truth is I never even thought about Puerto Rico until the union emailed us about the opportunity. I’ll just say it, too, that I didn’t realize they were citizens until the rep explained it all to us. And then, even though I knew he was still out there, might be dead already, I’d just gone home when the time for our trip was over.
I tried to call Brian again, but I just got dumped into voicemail.
The way he’d dropped the wallet into the water, hoping. Just hoping to live.
About a month later I was crying into the sink in our kitchen, and my husband found me.
“Honey, baby.” He hugged me and kissed me and rocked me back and forth. “What’s wrong?”*
Mr. Pruitt in his resignation letter cited “unrelenting attacks on me personally” as one of the reasons for his departure. Mr. Pruitt had been hailed by conservatives for his zealous deregulation, but he could not overcome a spate of questions about his alleged spending abuses, first-class travel and cozy relationships with lobbyists. . . . Seeing those deliberations being aired publicly, amid a string of other damaging reports, focused Mr. Trump’s attention, a person close to the president said.
CORAL DAVENPORT, LISA FRIEDMAN, and MAGGIE HABERMAN, “E.P.A. Chief Scott Pruitt Resigns under a Cloud of Ethics Scandals,” New York Times, July 5, 2018
Acid Reign
ON FEBRUARY 17, 2017, the United States Senate confirmed the Administrator as the new warlord of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Administrator is a white Christian man. He loves Jesus, but his Savior is corporate and horrible, not the vegan version with the sandals.
After graduating from college, the Administrator went to law school, because, like the rest of us, he leads a fear-based life. After law school, the Administrator worked at a Christian law firm, where he defended Christians. The Administrator next prayed his way into a midwestern state senate and office of Attorney General, where he tried to give men property rights over fetuses and ban transgender children from going to the bathroom. Building on these victories, he scratched up to the heights of the presidential Cabinet and began to threaten the whole world.
The Administrator wore a dark-blue suit and a burgundy tie during his confirmation hearings. He waved his small, pale hands as he pontificated. Some Democrats observed scathingly that the Administrator had, while an AG, signed his name to an EPA protest letter written by Devon Energy, which objected to proposed limits on methane gas that leaks from oil operations; the Administrator shruggingly explained that he had only been serving the interest of his state. Other liberals complained that he’d once sued the EPA when it strengthened the National Ambient Air Quality Standards in order to give relief to the seven million American children with asthma. The Administrator smiled and said he’d sued on the reasonable grounds that the heightened Air Quality Standards were unattainable.
The Administrator was thereafter rescued by Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who softballed him an interminable and confusing anti-Obama question. When she finally finished speaking, the Administrator nodded earnestly, and said, “This paradigm that we live within today, that if you’re pro-energy, you’re anti-environment, if you’re pro-environment, you’re anti-energy, is something that I think is just a false narrative.”
Then the Senate confirmed him.
Ten days after the Senate co
nfirmed the Administrator, I received the following email:
From: Mike B. Kendall
[mailto: [email protected]]
Sent: February 27, 2017 4:56 P.M.
To: Marta Mendoza
[mailto:[email protected]]
Subject: Denial of 2007 Petition to Revoke
Tolerance for Pesticide Chlorpyrifos under
21 U.S.C. § 346a(d)
Marta please draft an order denying the NRDC’s and PANNA’s 2007 Petition for a Chlorpyrifos tolerance revocation as per the Administrator’s oral briefing 2/26/17 that I asked you to memorize as note-taking has been banned temporarily as per oral order issued 2/20/17. Pls submit draft by 0900 3/3/17. The file is on my desk so you’ll have to come and get it ASAP.
Thank you Marta.
MBK
Mike B. Kendall
Principal Deputy General Counsel & Designated Agency Ethics Official
Office of General Counsel
US Environmental Protection Agency
Main Office Line: 202-564-8064
“It’s a simple assignment: just deny the petition,” my new boss, Mike, said about an hour after sending me the February 27 email. As he talked at me, he stared into his computer and, as usual, never once looked my way, as I am a forty-five-year-old nonwhite female with zany black hair, dark skin, and a penchant for plastic glasses. “Say that there’s good evidence that it’s potentially harmless and we’re still researching the matter.” Mike is forty-eight, Anglo, Baptist, divorced, and sports a salt-and-pepper brush cut. I’d been at USEPA since ’08. He arrived in winter ’17 after a decade running dark ops for the Independent Petroleum Association of America and then doing something scary for Exxon.
“But we already know that it’s dangerous, which is why we were going to ban it,” I said, standing in his doorway on the third floor of South Building and holding the thick chlorpyrifos file that he’d just handed me.
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