Make Yourself Useful

Former pro surfer Jon Rose was riding waves in Sumatra when the 2009 earthquake hit, and he spent the next decade providing clean water in remote disaster zones. Last fall his Waves for Water crew was in Saint Croix when Hurricane Maria struck, so the team did what came naturally: got to work.

- Andrew S. Lewis

Outside the yellow concrete walls of the Caravelle Hotel, Hurricane Maria was hurtling toward shore with Category 5 force. Jon Rose, who had come to the area to implement water-filtration systems in communities already devastated by Hurricane Irma, seemed less alarmed than amused. Since founding his nonprofit, Waves for Water, eight years ago, the 39-year-old had experienced the aftermath of 19 natural disasters, but he’d never been on the ground before one of them struck.

Rose stood outside, in an open stairwell, and held up his iPhone so that he and longtime friend and fellow former pro surfer Ben Bourgeois fit in the frame. Instagram needed a video update. “We’re here,” Rose said, squinting into the wind and chuckling. “Still standing.” He panned the scene. Palm trees heaved in the distance. Heavy rain streaked through the fluorescent light of a streetlamp. In a second video, Rose led the camera into his hotel room, focusing on clumps of ceiling panels that had fallen into the puddles on the floor. “It’s all water,” he said.

The next morning, Rose and Bourgeois, along with Waves for Water’s Haiti director, Fritz Pierre-Louis, stepped outside and into an almost unrecognizable landscape. “It was like a bomb had gone off,” Bourgeois told me. “The island had lost all its green.” The damage was just as severe in Puerto Rico, where Rob McQueen, field-operations director and head of the organization’s Caribbean Hurricane Relief Initiative, and his team of three were located. Almost the entire island had lost power, and more than half the population was without clean water.