“December 29 will mark 100 days since the storm ravaged the island, and it appears that at least half of Puerto Rico’s population is still without electricity. The damage caused by the extended electrical outage is most acute in the island’s hospitals. A study of power outages in Ghana over a five-year period found a 43 percent increase in patient mortality on those days that a health-care facility loses power for more than two hours. But the absence of electricity leads to problems all across society — more stress, more disease, more accidents. In developing countries, electricity consumption correlates with lower infant mortality, higher life expectancy, and higher economic output. In August 2003, just one day without electricity in New York City caused a daylong 28 percent increase in overall mortality.
The ripple effects of a long-term blackout can be deadly in ways that are difficult to measure directly. No electricity means no pumping stations moving clean drinking water into higher elevations. It means no electronic forms of communication, forcing entire communities to rely on word of mouth to stay informed. It means no electric heating, no air-conditioning, and no refrigeration. It means taking three cold showers spread across the night so one’s body will be cool enough to sleep. It means buying ice by the kilo to store food and insulin. It means an increase in burns and explosions as people switch to candles, propane, and oil lamps. It means generators for the few who can afford them, and darkness for everyone else.
All of this has led, inarguably, to hundreds upon hundreds of deaths. After months of sticking by an implausibly low-double-digit death toll and ignoring his own official statistics, Puerto Rico’s governor announced in mid-December that there would be a review of post-Maria deaths that had been attributed to natural causes. Among the deaths that are still waiting to be added to the official count is that of a resident at a small nursing home outside of San Juan who, according to an employee, somehow strangled herself with her oxygen tubes a few hours after the power went out. The police marked the case down as a suicide. (According to police reports, the rate of suicide on the island has nearly doubled since Maria, approaching one per day.) Another is the patient who died in the emergency room of a hospital in Aguadilla, days after the storm. There was no air-conditioning, and, according to visiting doctors, the patient died of the sweltering heat. And yet the government’s official list of storm-related deaths does not attribute a single one to heat.
Multiple news organizations have calculated that the death toll from Hurricane Maria exceeds 1,000; the New York Times, reviewing mortality data from previous years, identified an increase of 1,052 deaths during the first 42 days alone. This, too, is surely an incomplete reckoning. Even as the federal government winds down its response, withdrawing personnel and equipment, some homes are not expected to regain electricity for months. Experts are warning that, with the ballooning mosquito population and lack of clean drinking water, Puerto Rico is at risk of an epidemic. Though Donald Trump has mostly ignored it, he is presiding over a historic tragedy. By the time the island returns to normalcy, Maria could easily have surpassed Katrina to become the country’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/hurricane-maria-man-made-disaster.html
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