Hurricane Maria: devastation in Puerto Rico

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico — Weeds and horse dung surround the Family Health Center Susana Centeno. Across the entrance of the emergency room, respirator masks and blue latex gloves are scattered from a fallen trash can. Inside, medical supplies, like cots and wheelchairs, remain abandoned in the hallways. Since Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, the only hospital on the island of Vieques has been shut down.

If the Trump administration had approved the funds to restore the hospital anytime over the past three years, Jessica Moraima Ventura Perez said, it could have saved her 13-year-old daughter Jaideliz Moreno Ventura, who died last month.

GUÁNICA, Puerto Rico — Puerto Ricans are still living in tents more than a month after earthquakes hit the southern part of the island on January 7, damaging more than 800 homes.

The earthquakes were devastating for an island still working to rebuild from the damage caused when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017. Earthquake recovery efforts have been slow, frustrating many. To try to speed things up, the House of Representatives passed an emergency aid bill in early February — a bill the Senate does not seem likely to take up.

After weeks of protests forced out Puerto Rico’s governor of two years, a replacement was sworn in Friday. But his tenure may be short. Critics say the process by which his swearing-in occurred is unconstitutional, and protesters have already taken to the streets calling for him to step down.

Puerto Rico’s constitution states that the territory’s secretary of state is to become governor should a sitting governor resign. However, the island lacked a secretary of state until Friday after Luis Rivera Marín, who had served in the role, stepped down.

Puerto Rico’s embattled governor, Ricardo Rosselló, has announced that he will resign after 12 days of massive anti-government protests.

“Despite the mandate I was given by the public that elected me democratically, today I feel that continuing in this position could make it difficult for the success reached to continue,” he said in a Spanish-language statement posted around midnight on Facebook.

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has placed a definitive bet on wind, water, and sunshine. Last week, he signed a bill, the Public Energy Policy Law of Puerto Rico, to power the island solely by renewable energy by 2050. Along the way, the island must draw 40 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2025 and give up coal by 2028.

This puts Puerto Rico in league with more than 90 cities, counties, and states like Hawaii and New Mexico that have set 100 percent clean energy targets. It also gives the territory a head start in bigger, more aggressive climate proposals like the Green New Deal.

On the heels of the Senate’s failure to pass a disaster relief bill on Monday, President Donald Trump posted a string of factually inaccurate tweets defending his position that federal government aid to the hurricane-ravaged island of Puerto Rico should be limited to food stamp subsidies, and made clear he prioritizes the needs of US citizens living in flood-ravaged Midwestern states above those of US citizens living in Puerto Rico.

In his tweets Monday evening, Trump oddly referred to the US territory as a “place,” accused Puerto Rican politicians of being “incompetent or corrupt” — he referred to San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz as “crazed” — and framed the question of how much disaster relief funding to provide to the island and flood-affected farmers in the Midwest as a zero-sum game, writing that “the Dems wants to give [Puerto Rico] more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful!”

Two weeks after a “bomb cyclone” storm, the American Midwest is still underwater. The South is still reeling from storms and hurricanes months later. And an ongoing disaster is still underway in Puerto Rico, which experienced the deadliest natural disaster in US history in 2017’s Hurricane Maria.

But help from the federal government isn’t on the way yet — and there’s no telling how much longer it might take.

Last Wednesday, the day before Hurricane Maria’s one-year anniversary, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló sent a letter to President Donald Trump, asking him to abolish America’s “territorial-colonialism” of Puerto Rico for once in for all. He urged Trump to allow Puerto Rico to become the 51st US state.

“As we revisit all that we have been through in the last year, one thing has not changed and remains the biggest impediment for Puerto Rico’s full and prosperous recovery: the inequalities Puerto Rico faces as the oldest, most populous colony in the world,” wrote Rosselló in the letter, according to the Hill.

President Donald Trump is really, really upset that Puerto Ricans aren’t thanking him for the administration’s help after the island was hit by Hurricane Maria.

In a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera that aired Monday morning, Trump shared his thoughts on recent events. He discussed the scandal involving Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and the controversy surrounding deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The president’s demeanor was calm and friendly, until the conversation turned to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. That set him off.

One year ago, Hurricane Maria smashed directly into Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm near peak intensity. With the fuller picture we now have of the humanitarian crisis that followed, it’s clear that few weather events have done as much damage to US citizens and infrastructure as Maria did to Puerto Rico.

Though the island has received more than $25 billion in aid and is gradually rebuilding, the initial response stands as a stark example of faltering and poor coordination among federal and local officials. Because of the failure at the highest level of government — all the way up to President Donald Trump — to consider the severity of the looming crisis before the storm hit and to take critical steps to mitigate it, the disaster was far worse than it had to be.

President Trump late Friday tossed off two tweets again rejecting Puerto Rico’s official Hurricane Maria death toll, following assertions he made Thursday that the official count of 2,975 deaths was a plot by Democrats to make him look bad.

The president again provided no evidence to contradict the now widely accepted death toll, which was calculated after months of painstaking analysis of death records and expected mortality rates by researchers at George Washington University at the behest of the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló. (Rosselló said in a statement on Thursday “it is a fact” that 2,975 people died following the hurricane.)

Ron DeSantis, the Republican nominee for governor in Florida, has embraced Donald Trump as forcefully as he can during the campaign. But there is one road down which DeSantis won’t follow the president: questioning the death count in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

The president cast doubt on the official death count from last year’s hurricane in a series of tweets on Thursday morning. Though the estimate of 3,000 deaths comes from official government sources, Trump suggested that Democrats had manufactured the numbers to make him look bad because the initial death toll from the hurricane was much lower. But experts and independent analysis had long said the death toll was much higher than the original official estimate of 16.

House Democrats released a scathing report Thursday accusing Republicans of shutting down efforts to investigate the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

House Republicans are trying to “insulate President Trump and his aides from scrutiny,” according to the report prepared by Democrats on the House Committee of Oversight and Government Reform. Committee leaders received some documents they requested from the Department of Homeland Security, but leaders have refused to subpoena requested documents and emails that the Trump administration is still withholding; they’ve refused to ask for a single record from the White House, according to the report. A spokesperson for Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) did not reply to Vox’s request for a response to these claims.

It’s official: Hurricane Maria was the deadliest natural disaster to hit US soil in more than a century.

Nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens, died in connection to the Category 4 storm that hit the island about a year ago, according to a report published Tuesday by researchers at George Washington University. The updated death toll confirms what many people already knew: that the original death count of 16 was way off, and that the local and federal government failed to protect the lives of millions of US citizens who live on the island.

Speaking to reporters briefly at the White House, Donald Trump repeated the most consequential of the many lies of his presidency — that the federal government did a “fantastic job” in its response to last year’s Hurricane Maria catastrophe that killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico.

That’s a line that Trump has maintained ever since he made a belated visit to the island after two straight weekends golfing, followed by the observation that “it’s been incredible the results that we’ve had with respect to loss of life.”

The government of Puerto Rico says it has restored power to the last neighborhood that lost electricity after Hurricane Maria — 328 days after the Category 4 storm hit the island.

On Tuesday, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) announced that it had finally reconnected all 1.5 million customers to the power grid, ending the largest blackout in US history and the second-largest blackout in the world. (Though some customers say the electricity is hardly reliable.)

Puerto Rico’s government is getting closer to delivering an answer to the long-simmering question about the true death toll from Hurricane Maria, the now-infamous storm that smashed into the island on September 20.

On Wednesday, the government submitted a report to Congress in which it acknowledges that there were 1,427 more deaths than normal in the aftermath of the disaster, a substantially higher figure than the official death toll of 64 it gave for months after the storm.

The second-largest blackout on record worldwide is finally just about over.

More than nine months after Hurricane Maria struck, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority is reporting that it has restored power to 99.9 percent of its customers:

What Yanira Cardona remembers most about the blackout that swept through Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit is all the waiting.

It took Cardona 11 days to find a working phone and a cellular signal to let her mother in Florida know that she was okay. In the weeks following the storm, she woke up at 2 am to get in line for diesel fuel to run the generator at her father’s home in Sabana Grande on the southwest coast of the island. After waiting for 13 hours, she went home empty-handed. She stood in lines that stretched blocks to get cash, since no electricity meant credit card readers weren’t running.

“A community without a school ... is a vacant community,” said Verónica Dávila, a second-grade teacher in rural Puerto Rico. “It’s actually a dead community.”

Dávila is a teacher at Paso Palmas, a school that has taught children in the remote area of Utuado for more than 70 years — and that closed its doors for good this June. The school is one of nearly 300 in Puerto Rico that are shutting down permanently this summer because of the island’s dire economic situation.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and two dozen Democrats blasted the Trump administration Tuesday for not doing anything to verify the true hurricane death toll in Puerto Rico, which researchers now believe could be more than 70 times higher than the official count.

President Trump and his Cabinet have remained silent in the face of growing evidence that Puerto Rico is undercounting the deaths of US citizens who died in connection to Hurricane Maria. The local government’s official death toll remains 64.

It’s been nine months since Hurricane Maria destroyed Puerto Rico and we still don’t really know how many people died from the storm. The official death toll is 64, but new research suggests it’s 70 times higher.

The controversy over Puerto Rico’s real death toll stems largely from this fact: State and local governments can calculate disaster deaths however they want.

President Donald Trump appeared at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Wednesday for an annual hurricane briefing, but the event had little to do with preparation for hurricanes. Trump’s remarks were especially striking for what went unmentioned: Puerto Rico’s brutal recovery from Hurricane Maria.

US presidents hold a yearly briefing with FEMA leaders to discuss how the government is preparing for the hurricane season, which this year started June 1, and the president usually gives public remarks beforehand to remind Americans to prepare too. That’s not what happened this year.

A superior court judge in San Juan ordered the government of Puerto Rico on Tuesday to release detailed data on every single death recorded on the island since Hurricane Maria made landfall in late September.

The data could provide much-needed insight into the true death toll from Hurricane Maria, which has been a source of controversy ever since President Trump visited the island and declared the low death count a victory. The official death toll is 64, despite growing evidence that the number of people who died in the storm’s aftermath is in the thousands.

More than 4,600 Puerto Ricans may have died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in large part due to delayed medical care, according to a new survey of people on the island collected and analyzed by researchers at Harvard and other institutions.

The study, published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that Hurricane Maria may be the deadliest natural disaster to hit US soil in 100 years, with a mortality rate twice as high as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. The only other US disaster on record with a higher death toll is the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900, when somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people died.