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,
at puerto rico s struggles one year off. reporter: clarissa ramos has to do this. every time it rains neighbors fill holes in the road to make what little maria left passable. even if narrowly. this is the little road that we got. we just put dirt here. look. reporter: after maria, puerto rico says only 2% of the island s roads were passable because of debris and land slides. but of course for clarissa hurricane maria took away much more than a road. the storm stole her way of life. you can t talk about maria without shedding a tear. why? it s my first time i lived through something like that. reporter: it would take nine months for hundreds of families here to have powered restored. 11 months for the entire power grid, and some communities are still on generators.
the biggest lesson i learned and i think on the book we fed an island is very clear is that everything is possible. that what you have to do is sometimes stop planning, stop organizing, and start cooking. that s what we did. we went from 20 volunteers the first day to more than 25,000. from 1,000 meals the first day to almost 150,000 a day. we reached 3.7 million meals. we went from one kitchen to 26 kitchens. that only shows you that the organization that was not supposed to be there wasn t a kitchen. what was impossible, we made it possible. that s what i learned, that everything is possible. you only have to start cooking.
capacity and then some to get people out of danger. the need is going to be great, and we will stay on it. and please stay connected to your brothers and sisters in the south. we ve seen a lot of devastation in the carolinas the last few days from this hurricane, and it s easy to forget because you get compassion fatigue. you want to deal with the latest one. but you have to remember what s happened before. a year ago today hurricane maria began tearing puerto rico apart. we lost nearly 3,000 of our fellow americans. renowned chef jose andres went to puerto rico. he served more than 3.5 million free meals. he s the author of the new book we fed an island, and he s been on the ground again as the tragedy of florence unfolds. chef, welcome to primetime. i m happy to call you a friend. and your efforts make you someone special. thank you for having me. you just got off a plane from the carolinas. an hour ago.
and people come here every day. you also showed anderson cooper the biggest paia dish he had ever seen. what was your challenge on day one to get the first meal out? it s very unbelievable you can showing it because the 20th of september has been world paia day in spain. but we were able to feed so many people. from day one the main challenge was only to understand what was the situation on the island. and that s what i did. i landed and i tried to find what kitchens were available. what was the situation with refrigeration and the food companies, what was the situation with the bread companies. and very quickly i got a very good assessment, very good intelligence. i knew that we had food, that we had bread. the only thing we had to do was