Several weeks before he would become a folk hero across Puerto Rico, Jorge Bracero slipped in a puddle at San Juan’s central power plant and broke his leg.

After a few days in a cast, he began to feel pain so intense he was unable to sleep or eat. When doctors realized he had developed blood clots in his injured limb, they prescribed a six-month regimen of blood thinners and barred him from returning to work for the duration.

It was July 2017. So when the first big storms of that hurricane season began bearing down on Puerto Rico, Bracero—a power plant operator with the island’s public electric power authority, known as Prepa—sat on the sidelines, miserable and frustrated, reliant on a pair of crutches.

Bracero is 38 years old and stoutly built, with buzzed hair and a dark beard. He has a sharp, pointed nose and prominent eyebrows that sometimes knit up into twin, back-to-back apostrophes at the middle of his forehead—especially when he is concerned. And he was often concerned that fall.

When Hurricane Irma hit the island on September 5, Bracero and his wife, Charlot, were among the 1.1 million Puerto Rican customers who lost power. They rode out the storm and its aftermath with relatives who had a generator; Charlot was seven months pregnant with their first child. Bracero slept on a couch, passing his days laid up in the humid late-summer heat, anxious that his wife might go into early labor, and fuming that he couldn’t do his part to get the power back on. “I felt useless,” Bracero says.

The job that Bracero was desperate to get back to can be brutal on a good day. On any given shift, he and one or two partners are responsible for operating two 15-story-high boilers, along with the 20 burners that heat them to produce steam and the six massive power-generating turbines that turn under the steam’s pressure. Bracero’s role is to tend to the machinery itself, while his partner sits at a console monitoring the plant’s water, oil, temperature, and pressure levels, constantly relaying information to Bracero. The heat is intense, the work exhausting. When he comes home, his clothes go straight to the balcony because they smell so powerfully of sweat and diesel.

Since he was unable to pitch in at the plant, Bracero settled instead for defending his colleagues on Facebook, where predictable rounds of invective were being heaped on Prepa for its failure to restore power. Normally, Bracero’s Facebook persona tended toward cheeky political memes, Game of Thrones jokes, and Star Wars references. But now he took to posting photos of Prepa workers doing dangerous things to get the lights back on. One grainy cell phone image showed a lineman balancing on a helicopter skid in midair, stretching his arms out into space to repair wires at the tip of a utility pole. “And then they yell, GET MOVING,” Bracero wrote. After Irma raked across Florida, he shared a video that someone had taken from high above a field near Jacksonville; the camera slowly panned across a sea of white bucket trucks that had assembled from all across the United States. “That’s why Florida has light and we don’t. That’s 16,000” workers, he wrote. “Here we are alone.”

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico just two weeks after Irma. “I have a very apocalyptic mind,” Bracero says, but the storm’s ferocity was nonetheless beyond what he could imagine. It brought sustained winds of 155 miles per hour and a 9-foot storm surge, cutting a roughly diagonal line across the island from the southeast over a span of nearly eight hours; its trajectory felt almost deliberate, as if plotted out to inflict the most damage. Bracero compared it to a terrorist attack. Eighty percent of Puerto Rico’s electrical transmission lines went down. The entire island lost power.