60 Minutes sent a team to Puerto Rico 46 days after Hurricane Maria barreled over the island. It’s not a surprise that things have not improved. It is incredibly sad that people are leaving the island in droves for the US mainland because they have given up hope that things will improve.
"At night, it really quiets down because it's dark," says 60 Minutes associate producer Jack Weingart. "The street lights are out, and most homes and businesses are also dark. So at night, you just hear this constant humming of the generators."
But generators aren't designed to run constantly for weeks on end, so eventually they break down. Then the backup generators, now largely responsible for powering a city, fail.
Such is life in Puerto Rico 46 days after the storm.
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For many Puerto Ricans, the best answer to their daily struggle is to leave. Some are calling it the JetBlue solution. Since Puerto Ricans are American citizens, the only transaction necessary to move to the mainland U.S., where many have family, is a plane ticket.
"People are really prideful that they're from Puerto Rico, and that this is their home," Weingart says. "[But] I met a lot of families who were making the decision to leave for good, mostly because they're not making any money, and they don't see a way forward. Their homes were destroyed. Their cars were destroyed. They lost their jobs in the wake of the storm."
More than 100,000 people have left the island since Maria struck on September 20th, and the governor's office estimates many of them will move to the mainland permanently.
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"That's a huge number," Karzis says. "These are folks, for the most part, that were teetering on the edge of their decision to stay or go, and Maria seems to have pushed them over the edge."
Every day at the San Juan airport, families tearfully break apart, bidding goodbye to the members heading off to start a new life on the mainland. As public schools reopened in San Juan, parents came by to request their children's school records so their kids could enroll in schools in places like Florida and New York.
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But what does this exodus mean to an already crippled island?
"It means a territory, which is already fiscally circling the drain, having the tax base erode even further," Karzis says. "It does not help that you're losing otherwise qualified professionals or a labor force that is dwindling. And what you're left with are folks that are older, and are collecting pensions at this point, or young kids."
Almost seven weeks after the storm, producer Graham Messick says, it feels like some Puerto Ricans have given up.
Must watch clip.
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