Last Rites for a Barrio

By William R. Doerner.

The island is normally swept by tradewinds from the northeast, but the torrential rains pounding Puerto Rico early last week came from the southeast, borne by a tropical wave that stalled and refused to move along. In three days, up to 15 in. of water spilled from the skies. In the hillside barrio of Mameyes, an impoverished community of more than 1,500 residents above the south-coast industrial city of Ponce (pop. 250,000), the downpour caused little of the flooding that afflicted lower-lying areas of the island. The 30 degrees slope on which Mameyes' wood and corrugated-tin shanties were built provided a natural sluice--first for the falling rain and then, tragically, for much of the settlement.

At 2:15 a.m. Monday the hillside under Mameyes suddenly buckled. The slide started near the top of the slope and gathered force in an avalanche of devastation. A shear of heavy clay and loosened limestone outcroppings tore through the flimsy homes, crushing many like so much matchwood and trapping their occupants. "I cannot explain how we are alive," recounted Julio Maldonado, who with his wife and six children escaped the swath of the slide. "First the entrance wall fell off, and then the other walls fell off. And then we were sliding down, sandwiched between the floor and the ceiling."

The hurtling mass of earth and debris came to rest in a ravine at the bottom of the hill, entombing its victims in a mound of muck 40 ft. to 60 ft. thick. It is still unclear how many residents of Mameyes caught in the slide's path survived the fall, but those who did escaped soon after the disaster struck. Unlike the havoc wrought by last month's earthquake in Mexico, the mud slide left no lifesaving pockets of air to sustain the trapped.

Nor was it easy to locate the dead: as soon as the rains stopped, the Puerto Rican sun quickly baked the gooey clay rock-hard. By week's end only 38 bodies had been recovered. But Ponce Mayor Jose Dapena predicted that the death toll could eventually rise to 500. That would rank not only as Puerto Rico's worst single disaster in this century but as the most destructive landslide in U.S. history.*

The killer rains claimed lives elsewhere in Puerto Rico's south, which bore the brunt of their fury. Flooding creeks and a collapsed wall caused 13 deaths in the El Tuque section of Ponce, and near

the town of Coamo, at least three automobiles plunged from a fallen bridge, killing eight. Nineteen bodies were pulled from the swollen Paso Seco River near the town of Santa Isabel, where another bridge gave way at the height of the deluge. Ironically, shortly after the weather front left Puerto Rico and gained sufficient new force to be classified as a tropical storm, Isabel was the name routinely assigned to it by the World Meteorological Organization. Isabel came close to gaining hurricane status as it approached the Florida coastline, but then rapidly dwindled in force.

At the request of Puerto Rican Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon, a Ponce native, President Reagan declared Ponce, Coamo, Santa Isabel and the Atlantic Coast town of Toa Baja disaster zones, making the U.S. commonwealth island eligible for federal relief funds. Hernandez Colon also joined some 3,000 mourners at Ponce's sports coliseum in a memorial service for 23 of the dead. The Governor has vowed to continue the search for victims "as long as humanly possible," while plans are under discussion to turn the Mameyes ravine into a memorial park. For many residents of the devastated barrio, the site is likely to remain the mass grave that nature fashioned with such awful force.

FOOTNOTE: *The worst previous case: about 200 lives lost in flooding and landslides in the Los Angeles area on March 2, 1938.

With reporting by Lorelei Albanese/San Juan and Harold Lidin/Ponce