Radio Vieques: A Story of Resiliency
Everything moves slower on the island. Life is unhurried, and the locals know better than to expect reliable cell service.
Vieques, located seven miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, is no stranger to being overlooked. While daily life may move slowly, its storms do not.
Before Hurricane Maria in 2017, Vieques had a single hotel and growing hopes for tourism. The storm destroyed the hotel and left the island without electricity for more than a year. After consuming over ten thousand gallons of diesel fuel to sustain generators, power has since been restored, but recovery has been gradual. The W Hotel never reopened, and the anticipated tourism boom has yet to return.
Oscar Ruiz, Vieques local and Executive Director of Sail Relief Team, identified what he describes as a resiliency gap. “After Maria, communication was the biggest problem. Your average person, we have found, still relies heavily on radio - because a lot of people, especially elderly don’t have cell phones.”
Those of us who live in the 5G lane check our pockets for weather alerts, leave the local news running in the background, or rely on sirens to let us know when threats are serious.
In Vieques, however, communication looks very different. Chalkboards are stationed in certain corners of the island and are updated with important information. If a local doesn’t happen to cross paths with a chalk board, or if the lockout didn’t make his rounds, a truck with a loud speaker in the bed circles the island as a secondary alert system. Even then, islanders have reported that the speaker system is often muffled, so while they heard the truck drive by, they didn’t hear the warning the truck broadcasted.
As Ruiz put it, “We need communications in Vieques. It’s a very complicated situation because Puerto Rico is always in limbo, we are part of the states but we are not part of the states. Maria was our canary in a coal mine. We went through Maria eight years ago but we are still trying to bring normalcy back again. ”
Radio infrastructure existed before Maria and played a role in issuing emergency alerts. But while Vieques had the station, the island didn’t have the power it needed to keep it operational. After Maria, Vieques once again had a radio station, but the attendant passed away and Ruiz knew they could not let the communication lifeline go with him.
“There was a window of opportunity for us to apply for a low power community radio station with the FCC. So we submitted our application and we were able to get construction permits to build a low power radio station.” Ruiz said. “So naturally we reached out to ITDRC to see if the org could help us with equipment for the communications part of it. ITDRC got back to us and shipped us equipment and we started to run the station on solar power ”
Ruiz said that once the equipment arrived, the focus quickly shifted to a larger question: “How can we expand from here?” While the station was initially envisioned as a critical tool for emergency communications, Ruiz is determined to ensure it serves a broader purpose, one that engages the entire community, not just older generations who have traditionally relied on radio.
Now the local high school students are being trained in broadcasting; learning how to host talk shows, operate equipment, and produce content. Ruiz is also working to grow the station’s offerings by developing local programming, expanding talk shows, and building out studio space to support a wider range of voices and ideas.
Although emergency communication remains the station’s primary mission, Ruiz sees an opportunity to create something more enduring—a platform that informs, entertains, and strengthens community ties. By blending public safety messaging with music, storytelling, and locally driven content, the station is evolving into a vital hub for connection on the island.
“Resiliency for us is, ‘can the island connect to the outside?’ And ITDRC helped us build that resiliency back.” Ruiz said. “The equipment itself changed everything, now we have a radio station, Genesis 94.3, check us out on the internet.”
