Eric Zuniga, Campus Carrier staff writer
Amerial Page, Campus Carrier staff writer
On September 18, 2022, Hurricane Fiona made landfall on the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, coming to shore as a category one hurricane with maximum winds of 85 miles per hour.
Despite its status as a category one hurricane, Fiona caused extensive damage in Puerto Rico, dropping over two feet of rain in many areas and causing over 100 landslides. According to the Associated Press, government officials have estimated that the damages may be worth more than $3 billion.
The storm also resulted in a serious disruption of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure. All of Puerto Rico lost power in the immediate aftermath of the storm, and although service has been restored to 90% of the grid, 137,000 customers still remain without electricity. Additionally, 837,000 customers lost access to clean running water. According to Zack Taylor, associate professor of environmental science and studies, the loss of critical services after a hurricane strikes can be just as devastating as the destruction caused by the hurricane itself.
“Especially in a place like Puerto Rico whose infrastructure is maybe a little more tenuous, you have two parts to it,” Taylor said. “You have the storm, which is bad, and then this period of no power, which it turns out if you’re in the hospital is a real big problem. The same is true with water. If people are drinking dirty water, and then they get sick, then you have all these ripple effects of cholera outbreaks or dysentery outbreaks or other diseases. It’s more than an inconvenience, it’s a health problem.”
This is not the only time in recent years that Puerto Rico has been affected by a catastrophic hurricane. In 2017, Hurricane Maria made land fall as a strong category four hurricane, causing over 3,000 deaths and an eleven-month power outage. In many ways, the island was still struggling to recover from the damage, with over 3,000 homes still severely damaged. Taylor said that Puerto Rico is more susceptible to hurricanes because of its location in the warm waters of the Caribbean.
“There are certain parameters that make hurricanes happen, and the Caribbean is one of the busiest places in the world for hurricanes,” Taylor said. “They are a place, just like Florida, that is vulnerable to hurricanes. These storms come off Africa and they come across the Atlantic and they form. It’s just a function of geography. The Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico are big bodies of water that are really warm, and hurricanes operate on warm water. That’s what they need to work.”
With climate change causing higher sea levels and warmer global temperatures, there has been concern about increased susceptibility to extreme weather events. According to Taylor, while the evidence suggests that there will not be an increase in the number of hurricanes, their intensity and severity will be greater in the future.
“The things that make a hurricane happen, the evidence suggests at this point that those things are not necessarily going to make hurricanes more common or more frequent,” Taylor said. “The thing that makes a hurricane strong is warm water. Well, we’re making the water warmer. There’s more fuel for the hurricanes that do form, so they’re likely to be stronger. That seems to have held up, if you look at the statistics on this.”
Taylor also said that changing wind patterns may make hurricanes move slower, increasing the amount of damage they can cause.
“What makes the wind is the difference between temperatures. It’s cold at the poles and warm in the middle in the tropics,” Taylor said. “As everything warms up, the Arctic is warming up more. You have less of a difference, so the winds that normally push hurricanes are slow. That’s a whole different threat. These hurricanes that are more powerful to begin with just stick and stay there. That’s a big difference; all the storm surge was worse because there was just more time to push the water up.”
As seen in Puerto Rico’s case, hurricanes can cause widespread economic disruption in addition the physical damage they inflict. Lauren Heller, professor of economics, said that natural disasters always result in economic downturn.
“They’re never good, and there is no silver lining,” Heller said. “So often natural disasters take out valuable property and things that people need, but also things like hurricane can disrupt things like trade routes and supply lines and things like that. So they also potentially hamper the rebuilding process.”
Puerto Rico’s economy has been struggling for many years prior to the hurricanes. It has a higher percentage of people in poverty than any of the states that it is a territory to, and its population has declined by almost 12% in the past ten years. According to Heller, this hurricane comes at a particularly difficult time for Puerto Rico, which has been recuperating from the effects of hurricane Maria and the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to experiencing the inherent constraints of an island economy.
“The need for rebuilding and the need for supplies are similar, but the increased cost of getting those things to an island makes that hard,” Heller said. “In some ways, it’s not like any island area down there is not used to being hit by hurricanes. But they had a huge disruption and were really just trying to get back on their feet, and also COVID hit at a horrible time, particularly for tourism-dependent countries and areas. That definitely hampered the ability of areas that relied on tourism to rebuild.”
Efforts to rebuild are often supported by federal aid packages and private donations. However, Heller said that often the well-intentioned donations people make do not meet the needs of the people affected by disasters.
“We have the best feelings and the best intentions in the world and then we do things like send a bunch of water bottles over to Puerto Rico or Haiti or whatever,” Heller said, “But usually, what people send aren’t what people actually need on the ground there. We love sending bottled water places, but people actually need water filtration systems. They don’t need bottled water.”
Heller said that for aid to be effective, it must be planned with the specific needs of Puerto Ricans in mind.
“The more tailored we can make aid efforts to individual needs and the more sensitive to those needs we can be and the less political we can be, the better,” Heller said. “We need to talk about, what are the systems at work that are causing a lack of access to water in the first place? And how is that specific to Puerto Rico versus somewhere else, because there are going to be differences.”
Additionally, Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. Territory may hamper its ability to receive the same amount of aid that is afforded to U.S. States. Christy Snider, associate professor of history, said that Puerto Rico’s lack of representation in Congress and in voting for the presidency may make politicians less like to grant the territory aid.
“The government will do some things, more than we’d probably do for Haiti or someplace else in the Caribbean, because they are a U.S. territory and they are U.S. citizens, but not as much as we would probably do if they were a state,” Snider said. “I’m sure there’s some politicians who feel like, you don’t get the same benefits of help them as like, Florida, because it doesn’t win you any votes in the national Congress or for the presidency.”
According to Snider, Puerto Rico’s territory status dates back to the Spanish-American War, in which the United States won Puerto Rico from Spain as a colony.
“It was during the Spanish-American War in 1898, where the United States was helping Cuba become independent from Spain,” Snider said. “We get involved in the war, and we do help get Spain out of Cuba, but we also took that time to attack other Spanish colonies, like Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam. Although we helped Cuba get independence, part of the peace treaty was that Spain hands over the territories of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States.”
As residents of a U.S. territory, people born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens and are free to enter, live and work in the mainland U.S. as they please. However, Puerto Ricans lack representation in both houses of Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Snider said that this situation has mixed consequences for Puerto Ricans.
“In some ways, Puerto Rico has the protection of the United States, without maybe having all of the same responsibilities, but at the same time they don’t get all of the same benefits,” Snider said.
There have been movements in recent times to admit Puerto Rico as a full state of the union. In a non-binding referendum, a vote held to gauge public opinion rather than enact policy change, held in 2020, a slight majority, 52%, of voters favored statehood. While national politicians have typically been opposed to this, Snider says that the recent increased attention on Puerto Rico may help statehood campaigns.
“No matter what they came in as, politicians will make arguments and will win over voters and things will develop, so I would not be surprised if sometime in the 21st century you do see Puerto Rico becoming a state,” Snider said. “I’d assume there would be some more opportunities if there was some kind of big political or environmental focus on Puerto Rico. It might open up Americans to seeing them as Americans who we want to be more tightly tied to.”
Regardless of the outcome of the statehood debate, it is likely that the recent focus on Puerto Rico will make mainland Americans more aware of Puerto Ricans’ status as U.S. citizens lacking national representation. According to a 2017 poll, over half of Americans did not know that Puerto Ricans were citizens of the United States. Snider said that increased knowledge of this situation can only be a positive development.
“I do think there has been more understanding of people just not being totally clueless about Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States,” Snider said. “I think that can only be beneficial, no matter where we go in the future, especially if Puerto Rico is in need of aid.”