As Puerto Rico Tiptoes Back Into Its Routine, Another Earthquake Strikes

The woman he had been chatting with on the street began to run into her house. “No, señora!” he hollered behind her. “To the plaza!”

It was another scary one — a 5.9-magnitude aftershock, on the 15th day since tremors large and small began terrorizing southern Puerto Rico. The quake stunned the island just as signs of life, like trucks selling fresh fruit on the side of the road, had started to return. Now there were more power outages, more cracked buildings, more feelings of dread that the worst of the shaking was, somehow, not yet over.

“Too much,” declared Israel Vélez Irizarry, 49. “It shakes and it shakes — and it looks like it wants to keep going.” His family planned to fly on Sunday to Kentucky, to stay with his oldest son.

Even before Saturday’s major aftershock, which fissured more roads and prompted more landslides, Puerto Rico estimated damages from a 6.4-magnitude quake on Tuesday at $110 million. Gov. Wanda Vázquez asked the federal government on Saturday to approve a major disaster declaration, which would clear the way for additional federal assistance, including funds for temporary housing. President Donald Trump approved an initial emergency declaration last week.

“We need to stay calm,” Vázquez said at a news conference Saturday afternoon. “This was expected.”

For Méndez and some two-dozen members of the Puerto Rico Engineers and Surveyors Association who gathered in downtown Guánica, near the epicenter of the quakes, the violent quake Saturday prompted Félix Rivera Arroyo, president of the association’s earthquake commission, to issue a stern reminder: No going inside buildings. Visual observations only, an initial inspection to guide future work.

“This is brutal,” said Erasto Garcia, one of the engineers. “I had never seen this, ever.”

Despite the strong morning aftershock, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the strapped public utility, said about 96% of its roughly 1.4 million customers had electricity. More than 6,000 people are still sleeping outside their homes, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, about half in outdoor government shelters and half in improvised camps. Nongovernmental organizations set up 19 mobile feeding sites.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .