Most of our missions have been hauling food and water to these towns and outlying communities that have been cut off by road access for weeks. Once we receive the lat/long from FEMA, it’s always a crapshoot if we can get in there or not as she’s a big chopper that needs some room to land and obviously these places have been completely destroyed by the hurricane….so road clearing, tree cutting, and building us the perfect helipad has NOT been priority #1 which is completely understandable. So our tasking then becomes finding an area that is accessible for us to get in safely and sometimes that is a bit tricky with the load we have in the back, power lines that are strung across an area…that should not be there…but Maria decided differently….trees down or barely hanging there, loose tin from roofs, etc! Puerto Rico loves baseball….and so do I, so those baseball diamonds are easy to spot a mile away and are the perfect places to land….but most of the spots we need to get to aren’t in the town….so we have had to get creative. Also many times we will show up to our lat/long and they have it ready to go for us and quickly realize our chopper is way to big to fit in that tiny spot….so we circle for awhile trying to get as close as possible to the location needed. One of our most “creative” LZ’s (landing zones) was a riverbank and after talking to the home owner….not only was she so grateful as they have had nothing for weeks for delivery as their main access road was completely destroyed by a landslide during the hurricane, but what used to be a beautiful sandy beach in front of her home was now nothing more than a rocky, muddy riverbed. Most of these people have lost everything…yet they are so grateful and happy for a case of water and an box of MRE’s (meals ready to eat) which sadly the instructions are written in English not Spanish so they don’t even know how to prepare some of it….interesting that I can get something from Amazon in a box with 15 different languages on it….but we can’t figure out how to put multiple languages inside of the packaging of disaster packages….anyway….stay in my lane I guess!