As soon as a hurricane hits
news stations,
presidents,
local governments,
and the public, want to know a number.
- The storm causing at least eight deaths in the Carolinas.
- More than two dozen dead in the Philippines.
- President Trump Thursday took to Twitter
to dispute the official death toll from Hurricane Maria.
But often, hurricane-related deaths
continue for months after a storm passes.
A year after Hurricane Maria,
the government raised the official death toll from 64 to nearly 3000.
But just having a number isn't enough.
To prevent deaths like this in the future,
we need to know how victims died.
I spent last year trying to figure that out,
with a team of journalists from
Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Journalism and the AP.
- We are having to do this because the government didn't.
Together, we have gathered the most comprehensive account of who died,
and why.
That information can help prevent the same tragedy from happening again,
the next time a storm hits.
- Why do accurate death tolls matter?
- Because they save lives.
I'm Ana Campoy.
This is Quartz. Please subscribe to our channel.
This is Aileen Morales.
We talked to hundreds of people like her,
because it's the best way to learn how their loved ones died.
Aileen's father wasn't killed by hurricane winds or flooding,
and that makes his death harder to tally.
It's easy to count a direct death -
somebody drowns or is crushed by a falling tree
as a hurricane passes.
But most deaths caused by natural disasters are indirect.
They happen when insulin can't be refrigerated
or a blocked road keeps victims from getting to a hospital.
Those deaths can happen weeks and months after the storm,
and they're the most preventable.
And they're also the hardest to count.
The Center for Investigative Journalism
went from town to town trying to identify victims.
And then they sued the government to get death certificates.
- We had by then 23,000 death records.
Not all of them have to do with the hurricane,
but then we have to sort them out and
go one by one and cross with our data
and our interviews and see how many of those deaths
were related to the emergency in some way.
It turned out doctors and officials
never reported the information needed
to identify most of those indirect deaths.
Without that, the best way to get a total count
is to compare the death rate after the hurricane
to the average death rate.
This is how the government finally came up with its official estimate
of 2,975.
But that still doesn't tell you who died
or what could have saved them.
So we asked Puerto Ricans to report loved ones
who died because of the hurricane,
and check their stories against death records.
- In their death certificate maybe it says
respiratory failure, for example.
But through the account
we find out that they went to a hospital
and they had no electricity and they couldn't use the ventilator.
That's when we see
okay this, this case is really related to the disaster.
Diabetics died because they couldn't get insulin.
Kidney patients died
because they couldn't get the dialysis they needed.
Others died from treatable infections
that overwhelmed hospitals failed to diagnose.
- When you analyze what's going on with casualties and deaths.
you can stop deaths.
We found out analyzing data
that deaths continue spiking one, two, three months after the storm.
Those deaths could have been prevented, and they weren't.
Doctors and officials need training on how to tell whether a death
was caused by a disaster.
All that takes resources.
- Puerto Rico's death certificates
get processed by the government of Puerto Rico
that has been under a fiscal
and economic crisis for the past decade.
This is Mario Marazzi.
He is the executive director
of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics.
- One of the big problems is that we're missing
the resources to have a better data infrastructure.
Better data infrastructure includes setting rules everyone follows.
- One of my biggest frustrations
is that the people that were putting those numbers together
never articulated the process,
the methodology,
or the criteria that they were using
to pick which deaths could be attributed to the hurricane.
And it's not just a problem in Puerto Rico.
There is still no definitive death toll for Hurricane Katrina.
There is also a varied estimate for Hurricane Sandy.
The same happened after the earthquake in Haiti and Typhoon Haiyan.
There is no global standard for determining which deaths
were caused by a disaster.
The Centers for Disease Control has a set of guidelines,
but they're only voluntary.
- Just like what happened in Katrina helped the CDC improve
its natural disaster mortality guidelines.
I am certain that what's happening here in Puerto Rico
will help them also refine and improve them even further.
The Puerto Rican government says it's learning from what happened.
The governor just announced that the island would start a registry,
so people most at risk
can get help during a natural disaster.
- Everything that can be learned from the Puerto Rico experience
is crucial to the whole world.
Our investigation shows that Hurricane Maria
was a slow-motion, months-long disaster,
which was partly manmade.
We can't control where the next hurricane hits,
but we can change what we do after it comes ashore.
And that's the only way to save lives in the future.
Thanks for watching.
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