This obviously calls for tax cuts.
And for an additional $700 billion for the military. Because ISIS.
And because Merka! F*** YEAH!!!
These poor people. It’s all so awful.
The territory’s $73 billion debt crisis has left agencies like the state power company broke. It abandoned most basic maintenance in recent years, leaving the island subject to regular blackouts.
Mostly because of laws Congress put in place without Puerto Rican voting representation that penalize the territory for… basically, being American. PR needs to nut up and apply for Statehood so none of those flagrantly punitive laws will be binding.
I’ve spent time on both St. John and Dominica. I can’t imagine how they’re going to recover. At least St. John is a U.S. territory - two-thirds of the island is a National Park. So there will presumably be some help from the U.S. mainland.
But poor little Dominica has no one to turn to. Their economy is entirely dependent on a mix of tourism and agriculture. From what I’ve seen, there isn’t going to be any agriculture happening there for a few years, and who’s going to book a trip there? Heartbreaking.
Imagine this, but with no trees: 
Puerto Rico must file for independence, that’s the only way they are going to keep all their best people from leaving to work in the US.
My husband and I spent 3 weeks on Martinique last Feb, which managed to escape the worst of both storms (they got tropical storm warnings only for Maria). But they are luckier, in that they’re French and relatively well off (it was odd seeing plaques on old churches or infrastructure projects with reference to EU funding).
I can’t imagine how these others are getting in to survive. Just horrible.
They are NOT “heading for the U.S.” They are already IN the United States. They are headed for the mainland.
Please stop contributing to the prejudice and ignorance that has more than half of non-PR Americans thinking PR is a separate country.
But… all their best people who stay are working in the US…
I don’t know if they must, but certainly remaining a commonwealth sucks.
Congress would have to ratify their statehood request. Why do you think that a Republican-controlled Congress would permit a jurisdiction that would likely vote strongly Democratic to become a state and have official representation in Congress?
On another note: Apparently, one of the big problems in PR is that their aging infrastructure is based 98% fossil fuel with only 2% coming from renewables. PR is rich in potential solar and wind. This would be a great opportunity to diversify and decentralize the grid and make it much less vulnerable to this kind of long-term loss of power.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/puerto-rico-power-outage_us_59c3dddfe4b063b253187f00
From what I have seen on CNN, MSNBC, Weather Channel, Dominica was flattened, both the trees and many buildings, and there are at least 30 deaths confirmed there, according to El Nuevo Dia (one of the three on line Puerto Rico newspapers I have been following since Hurricane Irma was headed toward the Leewards and Puerto Rico). The video I have watched this AM on El Nuevo Dia was a helicopter view of the Guajataca Reservoir and River. The heavily wooded area surrounding both, shows the same flattening and denuding of the trees as one can see of any panoramic videos of Dominica. Hurricane Maria was a direct hit of a Category 4 Hurricane, which I believe Puerto Rico had not experienced since 1932 (San Ciprian, 225 fatalities) and San Felipe II 1928 (over 300 fatalities). I know anecdotally from one person that the solar panel on their roof was blown off early in the storm. The one foreign solar energy company a friend worked for in PR, rented farm land and mountain side property to cover with panels. I imagine many of those were damaged either by the wind or by subsequent flooding. I did see video from Puerto Rico of huge wind turbines which survived the winds.
Even if all solar were wiped out, and that there is no way to “hurricane-proof” solar (e.g., batten down, remove temporarily - I don’'t know what’s possible or practical here), might not the recovery time for decentralized solar be less than that for the centralized grid and the power plants?
Good question. A friend whose son and daughter in law moved to PR for respective jobs this Summer, and live in the SE of the island where the hurricane made landfall, was telling me that standard protocol is to disconnect generating capacity (solar, wind, conventional) from the grid immediately prior to disasters or huge storms to avoid electrocution through water accumulations and other conflagrations. This was a direct hit where the Eye of the hurricane went from the SE (Yabucoa landfall) and the Eye and “wings” (for want of a better term) appear to have flattened and buffeted every part of the island. The towns on the West Coast are among the running list (in El Nuevo Dia) of the municipalities and townships still incommunicado (with the Commonwealth Government and news organizations). We know that the conventional energy infrastructure built from the 30’s to now probably did not contemplate a Cat 4 or 5. I cannot imagine that wind and solar, albeit more modern, contemplates that kind of wind. I like wind and solar, and am all for it, everywhere. I was surprised to see the huge wind turbines still standing.
It just so happens that my niece’s husband is a wind turbine engineer; I will ask him about the design parameters, and report back to youl. I recall that he mentioned something about modern WTs being really well engineered for high winds because of some bad failures early on. I understand the speeds are significantly higher at, say, 300’ off the ground to what’s reported for any given hurricane. The torque a storm like Maria produced must be mind boggling.
Yes, please do. This is fascinating. I mean, one of the fatalities during the actual storm on Wednesday (as opposed to the many from the flooding afterwards) was from a storm shutter that got sheered off someone’s window and hit a man, killing him. When we moved there in the early 60s my Dad, having survived as a child both San Felipe and San Ciprian, had these heavy, custom measured, wooden storm shutters that would be mounted with bolts into the concrete walls. They were heavy enough to kill someone. I only shudder to think what the humongous propeller rotors on the wind turbines could do if they went flying and rolling.
I found this today a propos of your thoughts that solar might be easier to restore after a disaster of this type. Thought you would be interested. There is an interesting embedded video which caught my interest before I went to pause it, about solar energy batteries.