On Sept. 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. The fast-growing storm, which brought winds of 155 miles per hour and heavy rainfall, left unprecedented devastation of life and land in its path.

As leaders of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA), Eli Diaz, CE 99, and Ryan Arrieta, CE 98, MS CE 00, have found themselves at the nexus of the U.S. territory’s recovery. Since Maria, they’ve been working diligently to devise ways to restore water and sewer services to the people of Puerto Rico despite the loss of electricity and communications.

“Since before the storm, we knew that water availability would be the most critical aspect of this emergency,” says Diaz, who serves as PRASA’s president. “Everything would fall back on our ability to get the system back on its feet, and we needed to be prepared and make sure our people understood our recovery plan.”

Diaz and Arrieta believe that having water makes all the difference in providing some semblance of normalcy.

“We needed to keep going, because people here are counting on having water,” Arrieta says. “Water’s such a trivial thing, people never think about it. They just open their faucet and there it is. But all the processes that have to take place within the operations and to be able to get the water there is very complicated. Especially on the island.”

A RETURN HOME TO SERVE

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Diaz and Arrieta had been with PRASA—the utility that provides water services for roughly 97 percent of the island’s 3.4 million residents—for less than a year when the hurricane hit.

In early 2017, Puerto Rico’s newly elected Gov. Ricardo Rosselló appointed Diaz as PRASA’s president. In addition to Diaz’s work as an engineer, he’s also a lawyer. He began his engineering career with Puerto Rico’s super aqueduct system, served as executive director of the solid waste authority and advised former Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño on infrastructure matters.

Diaz was certain his days in the public sector were behind him, but he couldn’t say no when presented with the opportunity to head the island’s aqueduct and sewer authority.

“I am very passionate about the water industry,” Diaz says. “When [Rosselló] offered me the opportunity to lead the water authority I knew that this was the perfect time to give back to the island that had given me so much. It also gave me the opportunity to go back and put all my experience and knowledge into one of the first industries I had worked in as an engineer. Although Puerto Rico was going through financial hardships, I understood PRASA’s potential.”

As he began building his team, Diaz recruited Arrieta—his longtime friend and former roommate at Georgia Tech—to serve as PRASA’s vice president of strategic and corporate planning.

After getting out of Georgia Tech, Arrieta earned an MBA and was consulting in finance and strategic planning for the energy sector in Atlanta. His experience working with utilities made him a natural fit, Diaz says.

“I’ve known Ryan for years,” Diaz says. “This is a position of trust, I had to make sure that I hired people that were willing to put in a lot of work and a lot of effort.”

Arrieta says he accepted the position knowing that it would be challenging, but rewarding, to return home to Puerto Rico and help the island work toward financial solvency.

Puerto Rico has been in a recession since 2006, and the government went into crushing debt over the past decade borrowing money to fund operating expenses and pension obligations. In 2016, U.S. Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, known by the acronym PROMESA. The act established a Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, to work with the government to restore the economy.

“It’s a very interesting time in the history of Puerto Rico, where a lot of precedents are going to be established, given the debt situation,” Arrieta says. “I thought, let me go down and be part of not only a challenging time and also a great company—because the water company here is a great company—but also the opportunity to work with someone I’ve known for many years, and a good friend of mine, and also a Tech alumni.”

One of Diaz and Arrieta’s main objectives with the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority has been creating a 10-year fiscal plan to present to the Financial Oversight and Management Board. As part of PROMESA, they’ve been meeting with stakeholders, restructuring the agency—as well as the debt—and gaining access to capital markets to fund infrastructure.

But those efforts ground to a halt once Hurricane Maria loomed on the radar.

A PROBLEM OF POWER

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A few days before Maria made landfall, forecasters predicted a biblical storm would head straight for the island, making a massive power outage all but certain. Arrieta and Diaz recognized that a lack of power would create a dire situation for PRASA.

“PRASA’s system is one of the most complicated aqueduct and sewer systems in the U.S. with more than 4,000 facilities, including 115 water filtration plants and 51 wastewater treatment plants,” Diaz says.

The mountainous topography of Puerto Rico makes pump stations necessary to get water uphill and through the system’s 20,000 miles of pipes.

“A lot of the water system depends on pumps, and so we need to pump water up the tanks and then from the tanks the water is distributed… through our systems. Without power, we can’t pump,” Arrieta says.

At the beginning of the hurricane season, PRASA activated its preventive maintenance teams to get all of its roughly 1,300 generators ready and on standby before storms hit. At the same time, more than 125 water cistern trucks were utilized for post-hurricane water deployment.

“We knew we had to devise regional approaches because of the potential complications,” Diaz says. “Everything—diesel, cistern trucks, chemicals—was mobilized pre-storm and that really helped us in being able to respond as quickly as we did. Regional heads understood the plan and were ready to implement regardless of communication or accessibility issues.”

As the hurricane moved closer, forecasters predicted it would bring especially heavy rains. Five days before Maria arrived, PRASA began emptying reservoirs to make room for the expected rainfall, ultimately lowering the reservoir levels by about 3.5 meters of water.

Just six hours after Hurricane Maria reached the island, the reservoirs had already risen 4 meters.

Diaz feels that the decision to drain the reservoirs was a bright spot against a dark, unstoppable storm.

“I tell you, that’s one of the stories that we reflect back upon,” Diaz says. “If it weren’t for our management, those reservoirs would have caused catastrophic damages. Not only to the properties, but probably massive loss of life. A bridge over one of our reservoirs runs at a height of 6 meters. We would have probably lost the bridge and the dam, if it weren’t for the process that we undertook lowering the water.”

Hurricane Maria put everything on pause. Strong winds toppled trees, brought down power lines and destroyed homes. Heavy rains flooded roads, making travel impossible in places.

“We haven’t had this amount of damage or havoc with other storms in Puerto Rico,” Diaz says.

He and Arrieta agree without hesitation that Hurricane Maria is the worst storm they’ve experienced in their lifetimes.

“You know, there is always the risk of some sort of natural disaster, here on the island, with the hurricane season,” Arrieta says. “But honestly, we went through Hugo, and Hugo was pretty bad, Georges also hit Puerto Rico, but this thing has been at a whole other level. It’s incredible, the amount of destruction.”

WORKING NONSTOP TO PROVIDE WATER

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After the storm passed, Diaz and Arrieta needed to make sure that PRASA could continue to provide clean water and process sewage—a difficult challenge. Diaz recalls staying in the authority’s San Juan facility for two days amongst uncertainty as the storm raged.

“We had power issues,” he says. “We had communication issues. Roadways were blocked. Everything at that time, at that moment, was very complicated.”

As part of PRASA’s emergency plan, generators kicked in to power some of the plants, and the cistern trucks that had been distributed to different regions of the island were deployed to transport water to areas without generators.

PRASA also used vacuum trucks to make up for roughly half of the system’s 51 wastewater treatment plants that didn’t have electricity. The trucks were utilized to move wastewater to plants that were powered by generators so it could be treated.

“A lot of people talk about the ability to provide water,” Diaz says. “But we also manage the treatment of wastewater. That was a big issue for us. We had the risk of causing wastewater to overflow through our manholes and run through our streets, contaminate bodies of water or even backflow into homes.”

Since Sept. 20, Diaz, Arrieta and their team at PRASA have been working overtime—often as much as 20 hours a day—to get the system back up and running.

“It’s an incredible workforce that we have here,” Arrieta says. “Everybody at heart, their No. 1 interest, is to do the best they can and help. With the least resources, with communications problems, with the power problem, you know they put in full time, overtime, sometimes even straight days, to get the system going. So, we’re very proud of the workers we have and the effort that they’ve made as well.”

THE LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY

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Recovery has been difficult and slow, with so much of Puerto Rico’s power and communication infrastructure ravaged by Hurricane Maria. Added to that is the logistical difficulty of being an island in the middle of the Caribbean. Federal aid and relief organizations can’t drive into Puerto Rico the way they were able to drive to Texas and Florida following hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Post-storm, Diaz and Arrieta say managing electricity has been their biggest priority. Much of the island still remains without power, and Diaz and Arrieta say they have devoted a lot of their time and attention to maintaining their network of generators so they can provide water and sewer services.

“The generator is not as simple as you would think,” Arrieta says. “Because you have the logistics, the staging, you have the fueling, the maintaining. And so, a lot of our daily operations have switched from providing water, which we continue to do, but also, we added this whole new dimension on how do we maintain power.”

But things are starting to get better.

As of Dec. 5, 93.5 percent of Puerto Ricans had water service, while about 50 percent had power. Fifty of the island’s 51 wastewater treatment plants were up and running again.

“We are taking steps to provide independence to some of our facilities,” Diaz says. “For example, we recently reached a collaborative agreement with TESLA Solar and installed battery packs in our wastewater facilities in Vieques and Culebra, two of Puerto Rico’s island municipalities. Culebra Waste Water Plant now runs entirely off grid through solar energy.”

For now, the goal is to try and create a sense of normalcy, more than two months after Hurricane Maria.

The water and sewer authority is concentrating on transitioning out of emergency mode and back into typical operations. Moving forward, Diaz and Arrieta are eager to renew their work on the fiscal initiatives that they were brought in to do originally.

Diaz and Arrieta say they’ve been inspired by the attitude of the people of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the hurricane.

“I really have to thank the governor, our mayors, the almost 5,000 PRASA employees and the people of Puerto Rico for their support through this very difficult time,” Diaz says. “Without their support we would not be where we are today. Now we have to put our full efforts into rebuilding and resiliency, given the probability of recurrence of natural disasters such as this, the Puerto Rico of tomorrow has to be tougher and stronger than the Puerto Rico of today.”