This is Puerto Rico on a calm night in July 2017.
Here it is again, after Hurricane Maria in September.
The storm's impact has been catastrophic.
It was at its strongest when it was passing over the most populated parts of the island,
which is home to about 3.4 million people.
The impact has been catastrophic.
It knocked off Puerto Rico’s power grid and now it’ll be months before most of the
island has electricity again.
What’s made recovery particularly hard is that the government has no money and that’s
partly because of its complex relationship with the US mainland.
Puerto Rico became a US commonwealth in 1952.
But nearly half of all Americans don’t know that people born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens.
The island’s economic downturn can be traced to the 1960s and 70s, when a special tax break
from Congress led US companies to set up shop in Puerto Rico.
Then, between 1993 and 2006, Congress phased out those tax breaks, and companies left the
island in droves, taking thousands of jobs with them.
Economic growth slowed to a crawl, and hordes of people started leaving the island.
The number of Puerto Ricans living in mainland U.S. doubled between 2005 and 2015.
As the tax base shrank, Puerto Rico went into massive debt to pay its bills.
Today, it owes more than $70 billion, mostly to Wall Street creditors
In May of 2017, it filed for protection similar to a bankruptcy.
Budgets for hospitals, schools, and roads were slashed.
Another US policy that partly led to PR’s economic turmoil is the Merchant Marine Act
of 1920, or the Jones Act.
It places huge tariffs on any foreign imports.
And although President Trump suspended the Jones Act in the wake of hurricane Maria,
these costs have been passed on to Puerto Ricans for decades.
Since Puerto Rico imports 85% of its food, people often pay double for food and other
basic necessities.
The high cost of living is one of the reasons 43% of residents live in poverty.
Crucially, the island’s financial woes have kept it from investing in the kind of modern,
automated power plant technology that’s characteristic of the mainland US.
That's going to make recovery difficult.
Most power plants in the mainland rely on natural gas, with some coal, nuclear, and
renewables.
But Puerto Rico’s old-fashioned plants still generate two-thirds of the power from burning
oil.
And all that oil has to be imported.
In the aftermath of hurricane Maria, the power plants are mostly intact.
But nearly 80 percent of the transmission lines that carry power are down.
And so are the roads that bring oil to the power plants.
While the island’s power plants are on the southern coast, most of the people live in
the north.
And between those two ends sit dense forests and mountains.
Apart from the challenging terrain, Puerto Rico’s electric utility company, PREPA,
relies heavily on workers with extensive knowledge — and those workers have been leaving.
Since 2012, 30 percent of PREPA’s employees have retired or left for the mainland in search
of better jobs.
Electrical engineers from Puerto Rico can make about 27 percent more money on the mainland.
According to its director, “PREPA is on the verge of collapse because there’s no
personnel to operate it.”
And that was before the storm.
Without technicians to repair all the broken transmission lines, Puerto Ricans are expected
to be without power for months.
And the consequences of that can be dire.
Without electricity to pump water into homes, it’s difficult to find water for drinking,
bathing.
No air conditioning or fans can mean increased risk of heatstroke.
And no refrigerators to keep insulin from expiring.
People are at risk of dying.
All of this means millions of US citizens, for the foreseeable future, will be living
in conditions we usually associate with places very far away.