Pray for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Irene

My son Edward is living and working at a field station in El Yunque, a tropical rain forest in Puerto Rico. Below is his report after Hurricane Irene hit the island. So far, he is well, but he still has not been able to travel out of El Yunque because downed trees cover the roadway. 

Hey everyone. So my e-mail is down, and I can't get onto Facebook to let you know that we are all okay here at the field station. We lost power Sunday evening and are still without, but thanks to our generator, we are one of the only locations on the island with electricity. It got a little crazy up here, the wind, the rain (so much rain!), and the trees; it got a little crazy up here. Let's start from the beginning.

Now, I didn't know about Tropical Storm Irene until probably Saturday night, when we all started talking about how it's probably a bad idea for us to try to hike El Torro the next day with a hurricane coming. So we opted out of hiking in exchange for building a pillow/blanket fort in the conference room. We thought it was the safest thing we could do during a hurricane. Also, by mid day on Sunday, Irene was still a tropical storm and was set to make landfall here in PR late Sunday night. We literally hung out in the fort all day Sunday, we ate dinner there, and watched Gladiator there too. We still had power when we went to sleep Sunday night, but we figured that was going to change. It had been raining since early afternoon, and the wind was really picking up by then. We also knew that UPR had closed down for Monday, and told everyone to stay indoors and not to try to go to work, so we had Monday off. When we woke up Monday, there was no power, branches were down in the parking lot, debris everywhere, but it didn't look too bad. I turned on the generator so we could keep the fridges cold, and so we could see if the internet was down, which it was. I wanted to see the what happened in the night to the surrounding area, so Rachel, Seth, and I went out to see what the damage was. Well, we didn't have to walk far, nor did we want to. The storm was sill happening around us, rain and crazy wind, but we wanted to see if people could get to us if anything happened. They couldn't. There was a tree down in our driveway, but many more on the roads outside it. The Sonadora River was cresting over the bridge lower down the mountain, and there was a landslide further up the mountain near the Espiritu Santo river, and there was of course the downed trees everywhere, it was crazy. The water flow on these rivers was insane, more power then I have ever seen coming from a river. It was intense. We headed back, and hunkered down inside because the storm wasn't over. The rest of the island was still black, Fajardo was flooded, all of the traffic lights are down, and people can't get anywhere. It's Tuesday, people are still stuck, and we don't know how long we will be without power. The Hurricane was a Cat 2 by the time it left the island and looks like it will be a Cat 4 by the time it reaches the Eastern side of Florida. Pray for Florida everyone.