Five Years Since Hurricane María: #ChefsForPuertoRico continues supporting the island
Today marks five years since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. With the scars of that storm still visible, the island is now reeling from the effects of Hurricane Fiona which hit on September 18. WCK’s #ChefsForPuertoRico team—whose roots date back to our Hurricane María response—began providing nourishing meals within hours of the storm and is supporting communities once again left without power and water.
What started as preparing meals from a friend’s restaurant five years ago shortly after José and his good friend Nate Mook arrived in San Juan, turned into mobilizing a network of chefs and more than 20,000 volunteers uniting under the #ChefsForPuertoRico banner to feed the island in a time of unprecedented need.
Arriving on the first commercial flight just a few days after the hurricane hit, José simply started cooking. The operation grew quickly. Five days after we served our first meal, the WCK team was cooking 12,000 meals a day. Within the first month, we scaled up and served our millionth meal. By the time WCK’s relief effort concluded, our network of chefs and volunteers would serve nearly 4 million nourishing meals. The spirit, resilience, and dedication of the Puerto Rican people who showed up each day would define how World Central Kitchen approached disaster relief efforts for years to come.
Hurricane María made landfall as a powerful Category 4 storm on southwestern Puerto Rico on the morning of September 20, 2017. Prior to hitting Puerto Rico, the storm had swept across the Caribbean as a Category 5 hurricane—devastating infrastructure on many islands. The storm hit the region as communities were still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Irma—another Category 5 storm that hit the Carribean just two weeks before María.
By the time Hurricane María dissipated, it had become the deadliest Atlantic Hurricane in two decades. The storm caused more than $90 billion in damage, with Puerto Rico bearing the biggest burden. Hurricane María devastated Puerto Rico, wiping out 80% of the agriculture industry and the entire power grid for the island. Over 3.5 million people were left in critical need of food, water, shelter, and other basic necessities.
Prior to our effort through Hurricane María, WCK had responded to several natural disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in Texas just one month before. Still, nothing could have prepared José for what he’d see when he got to San Juan. When Nate and José arrived on the first commercial flight to the island, they immediately recognized how dire the situation was—so they began to piece together a plan from scratch. José quickly linked up with local chef and friend Jose Enrique and by September 27, they were preparing sandwiches and sancocho—a comforting Puerto Rican stew—out of Jose Enrique’s bright pink restaurant in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan.
In just one week, we went from a single kitchen operating out of the restaurant into a coordinated effort reaching thousands of families across the island. Through a combination of emergency kitchens and food trucks, we quickly developed the capacity to feed 20,000 people per day. Shortly after, WCK established kitchens outside of San Juan, including in Ponce—the island’s second largest city—and by mid-October, the team was averaging 50,000 meals per day.
Our efforts In San Juan quickly outgrew Jose Enrique’s restaurant. With the blessing of the governor’s wife, we got access to El Choli, the biggest indoor arena on the island, enabling us to increase our output to more than 100,000 meals a day.
Relying on local businesses, chefs, and volunteers, World Central Kitchen served its millionth meal in Puerto Rico by October 17, less than a month since the first bowls of sancocho were prepared in that small San Juan kitchen.
WCK efforts reached every municipality across Puerto Rico. To deliver nourishing meals to even the most remote areas, we relied heavily on our network of food trucks and volunteers from every corner of the island. They prepared meals and went door-to-door bringing the comfort and community of food with them.
To celebrate the tireless work of our chefs and volunteers as the holiday season came around, WCK hosted a Thanksgiving meal with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, vegetable casserole, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Our network of volunteers and chefs also prepared and distributed more than 30,000 Thanksgiving meals for families throughout the island that year. Then on the Monday after the holiday, we reached the milestone of 3 million meals served in Puerto Rico.
In a December 13, 2017 message of gratitude to the #ChefsForPuertoRico team and all who supported our efforts, José shared: “When we went to Puerto Rico we never thought that our role would be to feed the millions. I have never seen more clearly than today what the role of World Central Kitchen should be.”
From September 2017 to June 2018, WCK served over 3.7 million meals in Puerto Rico from 25 kitchens, with the help of over 20,000 volunteers.
A core group of the #ChefsForPuertoRico team continues to stand ready in the event of another crisis. Because of this, we were able to start cooking within hours of the devastating earthquakes that hit the island in early 2020 and are again cooking today in response to another hurricane.
In the five years since Hurricane María, World Central Kitchen has remained committed to supporting the people of Puerto Rico. In 2018 we launched our Food Producer Network which is strengthening food security on the island and across the region.
Beginning in the early days of #ChefsForPuertoRico, World Central Kitchen developed a model of quick action that has since allowed us to serve more than 200 million nourishing meals around the world. To continue building on these efforts, we have committed ourselves to raising and spending $1 billion over the next decade to assist communities impacted by extreme weather events caused by the climate crisis. Support our efforts with a monthly donation.
