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Three Utah-connected families escaped Puerto Rico, but not before Hurricane Maria rained devastation on the island

(Photo courtesy Brian Valentine) Heavy trees block roads after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20.

The day after Hurricane Maria ripped through Puerto Rico, former Utahn Brian Valentine sent a message to his friends and neighbors who lived 10 miles away, asking whether they were OK.

After two days, three of the families had checked in. It took 10 days before Valentine heard from everyone.

The Category 4 storm on Sept. 20 blew fiercely for six hours at more than 150 miles per hour before leaving Puerto Ricans short on food, water, gas and communication. Among those who rode out the storm in Dorado, a beach community west of San Juan, before evacuating to the mainland were the Cataxinos, Valentine and Weeks families, who all have Utah connections.

“It was intense as it gets,” Salt Lake City lawyer Edgar Cataxinos said Sunday, two days after he returned to Utah. “It was one for the ages.”

(Courtesy Brian Valentine) Hurricane Maria downed massive trees when it hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20.

His friend Brian Valentine — who recently moved to Puerto Rico with his wife and 12-year-old daughter from Salt Lake City, where they have a house — said the eye of the storm passed over Vega Baja, a town 10 miles west of Dorado.

The homes in Vega Baja, most of them made of wood, were flattened by the hurricane, while the more sturdily built homes in Dorado appeared to escape major damage, Valentine said. Massive trees everywhere were knocked down and twisted into “just bare twigs sticking up,” he said.

And 10 miles east of Dorado, in Bayamon, homes of the Valentines’ friends were washed out and submerged in floodwater. He said one family was rescued from the roof of its two-story house by people on a boat.

Valentine said Sunday from his Salt Lake City home that he considers himself fortunate to not only have gotten out of Puerto Rico but also to have had a relatively mild time in Maria’s aftermath compared to his friends. Unlike the majority of the island, his family had an internet connection a few days after the storm, which enabled him to connect with his 18-year-old son in Utah.

Still, the situation was difficult, and each storm-related decision he had to make wore him ragged.

With the island’s power out, the Valentines slept in a tent in the yard to stay cool, but the heat and humidity were inescapable.

“I was waking up in the middle of the night with prickly heat on my skin. I had to chug some water, and I would just jump in the pool and then go back into the tent,” Valentine said.

He worried about how often he could run his generator to keep food cold before running out of propane, which also was needed to boil water to make it safe to drink. Three days after the hurricane, the propane was running low. But to get more, Valentine needed gasoline for his car, and to get more gasoline, he needed cash.

He waited in a six-hour line at the bank to take out a maximum of $100, then waited six more hours to buy four gallons of gasoline, the maximum allotment. Then he could go to the propane station to switch out one tank.

“It’s not a sustainable cycle,” Valentine said, so he managed to find a cellphone signal and bought plane tickets for Oct. 1.

The Weeks family — Monica and Jacob Weeks and their 10- and 12-year-old sons — got plane tickets and arrived in Utah on Sept. 24. They had moved nearly two years ago from Cache County to Puerto Rico, where Jacob Weeks works as a computer programmer.

Water pouring through the air conditioning in the bedroom in their Dorado home woke them at 4 a.m. on the day of the storm, Monica Weeks said.

She said the change in air pressure gave Jacob Weeks one of his worst migraines, and water was sloshing up and down in the toilet bowl. Although their home sustained little damage, other houses were battered.

“At one point, I looked out the window and saw tiles coming off a neighbor’s roof,” Monica Weeks said.

The Weeks family had stocked up on food, water and other supplies before the hurricane struck — including extra for neighbors and friends — but things began running out. The family left the island on Sept. 23 after Jacob Weeks’ business partner found a cellphone hotspot and was able to get plane reservations for them.

“It was a relief when we got on the airplane and felt the cool air conditioning,” Monica Weeks said. “Until the plane was in the air, we couldn’t relax.”

Meanwhile, Valentine watched reports that flights out of the island were being canceled.

“I’m not confident we’re getting out,” Valentine said, recalling his concern that his Oct. 1 tickets might not be valid. By that point, he was worried about his family being able to make it until then — they would reach the last of their propane, food and certainly the last of their clean water by that point.

Cataxinos — a patent attorney with a Salt Lake City law firm who lives in Dorado — learned that a U.S. business group was chartering a flight off the island. He received a text on Sept. 28, telling him that the plane was leaving a private airport in San Juan in two hours, so he alerted Valentine.

The two families — Cataxinos and his wife, Ana, and Valentine and his wife, Jen, and their daughter, as well as three cats — piled into the Cataxinos SUV and made their way to the airport.

The charter flight was delayed, and as they waited, they saw people running toward a shuttle to go to the tarmac. They learned FEMA had chartered a Swissair plane to bring relief personnel and supplies to the island. The pilot said they could hitch a ride on the return flight to Florida.

“Why would I fly back empty? Bring them on,” the pilot told Brian Valentine.

Unsure of whether they would make it out of Puerto Rico on their original flight, the group, cats in tow, grabbed five of the remaining eight seats. The plane carried 30 people off the island to Miami.

Cataxinos, Weeks and Valentine dispute tweets by President Donald Trump accusing San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz of poor leadership and saying people in Puerto Rico “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.”

Cataxinos said people were helping one another.

“That‘s where you see the best of humanity,” he said.

Valentine saw his neighbors form a community watch after houses were looted, but he also saw them bring meals to one another and to people whose homes had been flattened by the storm.

His own neighbors tried to help him fix his cistern, and he let them use his landline and internet connection. Beer became part of the bartering economy that sprang up in the neighborhood, Valentine said.

“We’re the most powerful nation on Earth,” Valentine said. “And we’re not able to get food and water to 3.4 million residents who live two hours south of Miami.”

On Wednesday, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert aimed to turn that tide.

Herbert posted a letter asking Utahns to donate to faith-based and nonprofit organizations aiding in disaster relief for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“It is hard to conceive of the struggle faced by so many fellow Americans living without ready access to clean drinking water, power, communications and basic medical supplies,” he wrote. “Imagine how you would feel if your family were in their shoes — you and your children without a home to return to, struggling to eat and cut off from those you know and love. This is the life our brothers and sisters have been living for weeks.”

Herbert recommended sending contributions to the United Way of Great Salt Lake, which has set up a fund that will supply Puerto Ricans with food, water, medical supplies and more.

“... Unless we take action,” he said, “these awful conditions will continue for the foreseeable future.”