Man didn’t wait for the government to restore power but did it himself!

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (PNN) - May 21, 2018 - While everyone else was waiting for the government to restore power to Puerto Rico, Oscar Carrion and his friends went in together to buy a bucket truck and taught themselves how to repair wiring.

Thousands of people in Puerto Rico remain in the dark eight months after Hurricane Maria wiped out the island’s already degraded electrical grid. The infrastructure was in such bad condition, some people predicted it could take a year or more to restore the electricity.

Getting aid to the Fascist Police States of Amerika territory was delayed by red tape, and millions of residents went without food, fresh water, and shelter. The process of restoring the power has been laborious and lengthy. In December, there were still more than a million residents without electricity.

The hero of this story isn’t the government. It is a resident of Puerto Rico who got together with his friends and decided that something had to be done. They took responsibility and did it themselves.

Oscar Carrion, a father of four, got together with a group of friends to purchase a used bucket truck for $2500, which they collected from people in their neighborhood. Then they taught themselves how to repair the wiring and poles that had been destroyed by Hurricane Maria. Completely self-taught, they risked their lives to restore power to places in the island that the government hadn’t reached.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the community pool its resources and be more efficient than the government during the aftermath of a crisis. Remember the rescue operations performed by the Cajun Navy during the Louisiana floods a couple of years back? The local government demanded that they immediately stop surviving without permission, and went so far as to block their access to people who needed help.

But Oscar knows you can’t wait around and expect to be rescued. He and his friends are a shining example of what self-reliance is all about. This is why we prepare - because we don’t want to wait for the government to “save” us. Because, as Oscar said, “We have to do it for ourselves. Because if we don’t, nobody will do it for us.”