states. what is a governor supposed to do? they re trying to send a message to the rest of the country. make sure that no one s homeless, no one s hungry, and make sure that we always continue to treat people like human beings. i m pamela brown in washington. you are live in the cnn newsroom. hurricane fiona, this massive storm, might drop 30 inches of rain on puerto rico before it moves on. and already, we are seeing scenes like this on your screen. flooded rivers tearing away bridges and making matters worse, no power. the island s entire electric grid is offline. it failed and plunged 3 million americans into darkness, hours before fiona made landfall. and puerto rico s main energy supplier says power will most likely be out for days. fema s assistant administrator for response and recovery told me just a short time ago, that more than 300 fema responders were already on the ground before the storm hit. let s bring in cnn meteorologist karen maginnis, monitoring fi
central kitchen teams are ready to help the victims of hurricane fiona. the food relief organization tweeted that it has teams stationed both in puerto rico and the dominican republic, ready to respond however is needed, preparing sandwiches to distribute as soon as the storm passes. chef andres wrote a book in 2018 called we fed an island: the true story of rebuilding puerto rico one meal at a time. he and his team prepared 100,000 meals a day at more than a dozen kitchens across the island. and across great britain today, people paused for one minute of silence to honor their late monarch. in london, queen elizabeth enters her final hours lying in state. earlier, president biden and the first lady joined the tens of thousands of british mourners paying their respects today
kitchen, a nonprofit serving nutritious food in wake of disaser it. he s also an author of the book we fed an island, the true story of rebuilding puerto rico one meal at a time. chef, so nice to see you. what are you seeing and hearing there in florida? well, i just landed a couple of hours ago. my team has been here already. we came like two, three, days before the hurricane hit, and, you know, i got lost trying to come to the eoc, and i saw a lot of destruction, and a lot of darkness already. signs obviously saying we will shoot you if you don t behave. what i can tell you is that so far we do what we do. our ngo, we try to provide food relief to people in need. we start by the eoc members,
our hope is we can pivot to a stronger, finish recovery of a stronger rebuild of puerto rico. joining us now is chef jose andres. it s great to have you on the show. you have restaurants across the united states. you re a renowned chef. that s not why we re talking to you today. you wrote a book we fed an island: the true story of rebuilding puerto rico one meal at a time. your story relative to puerto rico is this, you landed on the island days after the hurricane hit. your goal was to get food to people who needed it. in fact, you have a word that you used to describe yourself, i love. you call yourself first food responders. in the end, the operations ended up lasting months and you served 3 million meals. it was you and many other people, of course. when you re on, what is the biggest lesson that you learned from doing this in puerto rico?
in the new book, we fed an island: the true story of rebuilding puerto rico one meal at a time. i spoke with jose andres just before the broadcast. jose, your efforts there, first of all, how are they going? how many people have you been able to feed so far? i think by the end of today, we did 80,000 meals. we have two kitchens, one right here in wilmington, another one in raleigh. we have three more ready to go if we feel we need it. but you know, in wilmington we ve been able to feed different counties, more than 20 shelters in the area. so so far very happy of the response i see on the feeding front and all the help, all across the area, i m able to be driving by every day. what s the biggest difficulty? because obviously, there s a lot of roads closed, trees are down, floodwaters are still rising. today, finally, we were able to see some blue sky, but obviously, the water keeps coming down the river. we ve been feeding for the last three, four days, even through the hurri