SAN JUAN — The mountain was on fire. The ground shook. “The Utuado volcano woke up,” people were saying. They had never seen a fire like it there before.
José Nevárez Pérez, a burly man who used to work as a civilian diver for the U.S. Navy, spent the four days that the fire raged roaming the area behind his house, a walking stick in one hand, machete in the other. The fire had reportedly burned for at least a week on the other side of the mountain before it spread to the trees behind his house, where he lives with his family of four and their three dogs.
“I spend most of my afternoons walking up and down the forest—or at least I used to,” Nevárez Pérez told me as we watched columns of smoke swirl up over a forest canopy that had once been various shades of green but had become a mottled mess of black, gray, and brown. A National Guard Black Hawk helicopter had just dropped a torrent of water on a spot that was too difficult for firefighters to reach by foot.
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