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'Katrina brain': The invisible long-term toll of megastorms.
Long after a big hurricane blows through, its effects hammer the mental-health system.
Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
The Agenda
AGENDA 2020
'Katrina brain': The invisible long-term toll of megastorms
Long after a big hurricane blows through, its effects hammer the mental-health system.
By CHRISTINE VESTAL 10/12/2017 05:10 AM EDT
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NEW ORLEANS — Brandi Wagner thought she had survived Hurricane Katrina. She hung tough while the storm’s 170-mph winds pummeled her home, and powered through two months of sleeping in a sweltering camper outside the city with her boyfriend’s mother. It was later, after the storm waters had receded and Wagner went back to New Orleans to rebuild her home and her life that she fell apart.
“I didn’t think it was the storm at first. I didn’t really know what was happening to me,” Wagner, now 48, recalls. “We could see the waterline on houses, and rooftop signs with ‘please help us,’ and that big X where dead bodies were found. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. I was crying all the time, just really losing it.”
Twelve years later, Wagner is disabled and unable to work because of the depression and anxiety she developed in the wake of the 2005 storm. She’s also in treatment for an opioid addiction that developed after she started popping prescription painkillers and drinking heavily to blunt the day-to-day reality of recovering from Katrina.
More than 1,800 people died in Katrina from drowning and other immediate injuries. But public health officials say that, in the aftermath of an extreme weather event like a hurricane, the toll of long-term psychological injuries builds in the months and years that follow, outpacing more immediate injuries and swamping the health care system long after emergency workers go home and shelters shut down.
That’s the rough reality that will soon confront regions affected by this year’s string of destructive hurricanes. As flood waters recede from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate, and survivors work to rebuild communities in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, mental health experts warn that the hidden psychological toll will mount over time, expressed in heightened rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, domestic violence, divorce, murder and suicide.
Brandi Wagner's home in Lafitte, La., left, and the nearby bayou, Bayou Barataria, right. Below, sandbags line the street across from Wagner's home as Hurricane Nate approached earlier this month. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
Renée Funk, who manages hurricane response teams for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says it has become clear since Katrina that mental illness and substance abuse aren’t just secondary problems—they are the primary long-term effect of natural disasters.
“People have trouble coping with the new normal after a storm,” Funk said. “Many have lost everything, including their jobs. Some may have lost loved ones, and now they have to rebuild their lives. They’re faced with a lot of barriers, including mental illness itself,” she said.
In New Orleans, doctors are still treating the psychological devastation of Katrina. More than 7,000 patients receive care for mental and behavioral health conditions just from the Jefferson Parish Human Services Authority, a state-run mental health clinic in Marrero, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. At least 90 percent of the patients lived through Katrina and many still suffer from storm-related disorders, according to medical director and chief psychiatrist Thomas Hauth, who adds that he and most of his fellow clinicians also suffer from some level of long-term anxiety from the storm.
“Every year about this time, I start checking the National Weather Service at least three times a day,” he said.
These long-term mental health effects of extreme weather are a hidden public health epidemic, one that is expected to strain the U.S. health care system as the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes and other natural disasters increase in coming decades because of global warming and other planetary shifts.
With climatologists promising more extreme weather across the country, mental and behavioral health systems need to start preparing and expanding dramatically or demand for treatment of the long-term psychological effects of future natural disasters will vastly outstrip the supply of practitioners, said Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association.
Dr. Thomas Hauth, a psychiatrist, in his office at the Jefferson Parish Human Services Authority in Marrero, La., where he treats residents still suffering from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental disorders caused or exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina. Hauth and his colleagues also report post-storm anxiety and other conditions. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
“On a blue sky day, our mental health resources are stretched,” said Carol North, researcher and professor of psychiatry at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. “There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but common sense tells us that more disasters and worse disasters will lead to worse psychological effects.”
”Katrina brain”
For climate change believers, this year’s string of record-breaking Atlantic hurricanes was just a warm-up for what scientists predict will be more frequent extreme weather events in the future.
When an entire city experiences a significant trauma at the same time, as New Orleans did during Katrina and Houston did during Harvey, it can push a lot of people over the edge, said Eric Kramer, another doctor who worked in the Jefferson Parish clinic: “Some people can rely on their inner strength and resilience to get through it, but others can’t.”
In the aftermath of Katrina, many survivors struggled with short-term memory loss and cognitive impairment, a syndrome dubbed “Katrina brain,” according to a report by Ken Sakauye, a University of Tennessee professor of psychiatry who was at Louisiana State University at the time.
Even though more than half the population of New Orleans had evacuated, psychiatric helpline calls increased 61 percent in the months after Katrina, compared with the same period before the storm, death notices increased 25 percent, and the city’s murder rate rose 37 percent, Sakauye wrote.
A year after Katrina, psychiatrist James Barbee reported that many of his patients in New Orleans had deteriorated from post-Katrina anxiety to more serious cases of depression and anxiety. "People are just wearing down," Barbee said. "There was an initial spirit about bouncing back and recovering, but it's diminished over time, as weeks have become months.”
In a longitudinal study comparing the mental health of low-income single moms in New Orleans before and after Katrina, one in five participants reported elevated anxiety and depression that had not returned to pre-storm levels four years later, said Jean Rhodes, study co-author and professor of psychiatry at University of Massachusetts Boston.
Hurricane Katrina killed 1,800 people in 2005, and left behind massive property damage. But publiGetty Imagesc health officials are learning that the longest-lasting damage of several storms is psychological. | Getty Images
For a smaller percentage of people in the study, particularly people with no access to treatment, symptoms of anxiety developed into more serious, chronic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers found.
These aren’t cheap conditions to treat. One study cited by the CDC estimated the cost of treating even the short-term effects of anxiety disorders at more than $42 billion annually; double-digit regional leaps in rates of anxiety could cause serious financial strain to patients, employers, insurers and the government.
Vicarious reactions
Some damage can take place outside the storm-hit region. Even for people who have never experienced the raging winds, floods and prolonged power outages of a hurricane, this season’s repeated images of people struggling against the storms on television and other news and social media created unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression nationwide, said Washington, D.C., psychiatrist and environmental activist Lise Van Susteren.
“There is a vicarious reaction. When we see people flooded out of their homes, pets lost, belongings rotting in the streets, and people scared out of their wits, we experience an empathic identification with the victims,” she said.
Brandi Wagner pulls out the medications she must take on a daily basis to control a range of storm-related disorders including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and an addiction to opioids. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
“People come in saying they can’t sleep, they’re drinking too much, they’re having trouble with their kids, their jobs or their marriages are falling apart. They may not know where the anxiety is coming from, but everyone is affected by the stress of climate change.”
The same kind of vicarious reactions were documented after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and after Hurricane Katrina, particularly in children, said Columbia University pediatrician and disaster preparedness expert Irwin Redlener.
“The mental health effects of natural disasters are really important and vastly overlooked, not only acutely but over the long term,” he said.
Everyone who lives through a major storm experiences some level of anxiety and depression. But for low-income people and those without strong social supports, the symptoms are much worse, said Ronald Kessler, an epidemiologist and disaster policy expert at Harvard Medical School. The same is true for people who already suffered from mental illness or drug or alcohol addiction before the disaster occurred.
Repeated exposure to weather disasters is another risk factor for mental and behavioral disorders. Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, followed by Hurricane Rita less than a month later. Three years after that, Hurricane Gustav hit the Louisiana coast, followed by Hurricane Ike two weeks later.
In September, many who had fled Hurricane Katrina and resettled in Houston had to relive the same horrors all over again, putting them at higher risk for long-term mental health problems.
TOP LEFT: Wagner in her backyard. TOP RIGHT: Wagner's medications. BOTTOM LEFT: Wagner shows off a photo of her son, Sgt. Aaron Briggs, receiving his sergeant badge in a photo on her phone. BOTTOM RIGHT: Wagner's daughter, Jessica Briggs, her grandson, Jeremy Goudeau Jr., and her daughter, Kristina Briggs, at her home in Lafitte, La.. | Bryan Tamowski for POLITICO
But perhaps the greatest risk of adverse mental health reactions to storms occurs when an entire community like New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward is so completely destroyed that people can’t return to normal for months or years, if ever. For those who left and went to live in Houston, Atlanta and other far-flung cities, the dislocation and loss of community was equally harmful, researchers say.
“People are only physically and mentally resilient to a point and then they are either irretrievably injured or they die,” Kessler said. If storms intensify in the future, the kind of devastation parts of New Orleans experienced could become more common, he said.
Psychiatric First Aid
In the past decade, first responders and public health workers began training in a type of mental health first aid that research has shown to be effective in lowering anxiety and reducing the risk that the traumas experienced during a storm will lead to serious mental illness.
Using evidence-based techniques, rescue workers reassure storm survivors that feelings of sadness, anger and fear are normal and that they are likely to go away quickly. But when survivors complain that they’ve been crying nonstop, haven’t slept for days or are having suicidal thoughts, rescue workers are trained to make sure they get more intensive mental health care immediately.
In Houston, for example, teams of doctors, nurses, mental health counselors and other health care professionals offered both physical and mental health services at clinics set up in every storm shelter. The city’s emergency medical director, Davie Persse, said the clinics were so successful that local hospital emergency departments reported no surges in patients with psychiatric distress or minor injuries.
Forced evacuation, whether temporary or permanent, can also trigger psychological problems for people confronted by natural disasters. | Wikimedia Commons
Another important factor in reducing the psychological impacts of a storm is avoiding secondary traumas like being stranded for weeks in the convention center in New Orleans, said Sarah Lowe, a co-author of the Katrina study who teaches psychology at Montclair University in New Jersey. “Repeated traumas can pile up almost the way concussions do.”
“What I’m seeing in Harvey and Irma is there’s more mitigation of secondary trauma,” Lowe said. People were allowed to take their pets to the shelters with them, for example. In Katrina, survivors either had to leave their pets behind or stay in their homes and be more exposed to physical and mental dangers.
Evacuation and relocation
Some public health experts say that we need to start thinking of longer-term solutions to the longer-term problem of severe weather; instead of trying to treat post-storm psychological damage, we should avoid it in the first place by persuading residents to move out of storm-prone areas.
“We do a great job with preparedness and response to hurricanes in this country. It’s an amazing accomplishment,” said Mark Keim, an Atlanta-based consultant who works with the CDC and the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Health. “But as climate change progresses over the next one hundred years, what are we going to do—respond, respond, respond? We can’t afford that anymore.”
According to Keim, much of the rest of the world is already taking that approach:
“Hurricanes can’t be prevented, but by refusing to rebuild in flood plains and developing the infrastructure needed to reduce inland flooding and coastal surges, we can avoid much of the human exposure to the coming storms. That’s where the world is right now in disaster management. Preparedness and response are older approaches.”
Climate change experts agree. To avoid increasing loss of lives from the mega storms expected in the decades ahead, large coastal populations should relocate, researchers say. Mathew Hauer, a demographer at the University of Georgia, recently found that a predicted 6-foot rise in sea levels by 2100 would put 13 million people in more than 300 U.S. coastal counties at risk of major flooding.
But relocating large populations has its own risks. For the hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents who rebuilt their lives far from home after Katrina, the loss of social ties and the stress of adapting to new surroundings also took a heavy psychological toll, according to recent research at the University of California.
There’s another problem with relocating people from coastal regions. It’s not just hurricanes that are expected to plague the planet as the climate shifts. Wildfires, droughts, inland flooding, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters are also expected to increase in frequency and intensity, making it hard to find a safe place to put down new roots.
“Whether people decide to stay or decide to move, which means giving up a way of life, the long-term psychological costs of climate change appear to be inevitable,” Harvard’s Kessler said. “We can expect a growing number of people to have to face that dilemma. They’ll be affected by extreme weather one way or another, and they will need psychological help that already is in short supply.”
Christine Vestal is a reporter for Stateline, a nonprofit journalism project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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Amid wreckage of hurricane-devastated Caribbean, leaders see a climate change opening.
Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit wants to transform his country into the “world’s first climate-resistant nation in the climate change era.” And he wants the United Nations at his side on the front lines.
ALYBIA, DOMINICA
In the ruins of his hurricane-ravaged nation, Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit sees the homes that have to be razed, the hospital and clinics that collapsed and the power lines that failed.
But amid the overwhelming destruction wrought by a powerful Hurricane Maria last month, Skerrit also sees opportunity. On Sunday, as U.N. Secretary General António Guterres wrapped up a 24-hour visit here and to Antigua and Barbuda, Skerrit presented a bold rebuilding plan for a tiny country that today can barely provide food and water for its people but wants to be a model for the Caribbean.
He wants to transform Dominica, he said, into the “world’s first climate-resistant nation in the climate change era.” And he wants the United Nations — and Guterres — at his side on the front lines.
“Our devastation is so complete that our recovery has to be total,” Skerrit said. “We have a unique opportunity to be an example to the world, an example of how an entire nation rebounds from disaster and how an entire nation can be climate resilient for the future.
“We did not choose this opportunity. We did not wish it,” he added. “Having had it thrust upon us, we have chosen actively and decisively to be that example to the world.”
The plan, which began in 2015 after Tropical Storm Erika’s floods and mudslides left the island with a $482 million reconstruction bill, calls for more renewable energy and less fossil fuels, hospitals and clinics that won’t become paralyzed by power outages, infrastructure built around the environment and crops capable of withstanding today’s climate swings.
“The intensity of hurricanes are increasing and we need to ensure we can build better, resilient infrastructure,” said Skerrit, who arrived in Washington Monday ahead of a World Bank and International Monetary Fund meeting this week to press his case for assistance. “We’re going to need significant sums of resources.”
But if almost half a billion dollars was required to rebuild after Erika, Maria’s damage — coupled with the push to climate-proof the new construction — will likely cost many times that amount. Skerrit said his government has invited several independent agencies to assess how much money Dominica will need. Similar economic studies are also being conducted on hurricane-struck Barbuda — which Guterres toured on foot Saturday — along with the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos.
“The intensity of hurricanes and multiplication of hurricanes in the Caribbean in this season is not an accident,” Guterres stressed during his visit. “It is the result of climate change.”
Stephen O’Malley, the U.N. resident coordinator for Barbados and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, said he estimates the recovery costs will total about $1 billion for the hurricane-struck eastern Caribbean, but the final report will give a better idea of what island nations are up against. And that doesn’t include rebuilding to climate-resistant standards.
Guterres welcomed Skerrit’s vision, which dovetails with that of Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne, who announced that he, too, plans to transform Barbuda into a green, climate-resilient island. But Guterres added that the Caribbean leaders cannot rebuild their islands, much less make them more climate resilient, on their own. They will need the help of the international community, he said, through low-interest loans and new kinds of financing.
“This is going to be a battle,” Guterres told the Miami Herald, of the push to get the international community to do more to support the islands in their climate-resilient reconstruction bid. “It’s going to require thinking out of the box.”
While no country can be completely impervious to climate change, Guterres said, changes can help, such as new construction standards and farming techniques to resist drought and deluge.
The discussion among top Caribbean leaders contrasts with their closest neighbors in the U.S. In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott has avoided taking a position on climate change and on Monday, the Trump administration announced it plans to repeal former President Barack Obama’s signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.
But in the Caribbean, leaders don’t need convincing about the devastating effects of warmer temperatures and rising sea levels. Skerrit and Browne, whose countries were hammered by two Category 5 storms within 12 days, are convinced that a changed planet is going to require new tactics for life in paradise. And they have found a champion in Guterres.
“We need to preserve our paradises. We need to make climate protection our top priority,” the U.N. chief said. “The link between climate change and the devastation is real and there is a collective responsibility by the international community to stop this suicidal event.”
A believer in the fight to combat climate change — long before 147 countries in Paris agreed to reduce greenhouse gases and help poor countries adapt — Guterres’ drive to address the issue is a personal one, coming from his own experience.
He learned from scientific contacts and research while organizing university seminars on innovation and sustainable development in his native Portugal, where he also served as the country’s prime minister. From his engineering background, he gleaned an understanding of how building a dam in Portugal to combat forecasts of five years of drought help stave off a crisis.
And his former role as the U.N.’s high commissioner for refugees has helped, too, when he had to respond to a wave of African farmers from the Sahel region fleeing to Europe because of changing weather patterns.
“Before, there were droughts every 10 years, then every five years. Now every two years there is a drought...more people are being forced to move,” he said. “Climate change will be one of the main drivers of displacement in the world.”
As he flew over parts of Dominica Sunday aboard a World Food Program flight, Guterres was shocked by the level of “systematic devastation” blanketing the country.
“Not a single leaf,” he said, looking at the trees below that had been stripped down to sticks.
The pride of nature preservationists, Dominica has been known as Nature’s Island. The rainforest is devoid of life, its colorful parrots and wildlife scattered, and the lush green mountains have turned brown. Twenty-six are confirmed dead and 31 are missing, Skerrit said.
“I have never seen anywhere else in the world a forest completely decimated without a single leaf on any tree,” Guterres said. Though he had witnessed the devastation in Barbuda, that island is linked to a bigger one, Antigua, which can support it. In Dominica, an entire nation was flattened.
Guterres and Skerrit visited Salybia, a farming village in the Kalinago territory, where descendants of the island’s indigenous population, formerly known as Caribs, live. Aid packets of rice, tuna, lentils, flour and salt were being distributed by U.N. humanitarian agencies in cooperation with the government and local authorities. Nearby, wood and chunks of concrete from destroyed homes littered the land.
Kalinago Chief Charles Williams welcomed him, telling the crowd that while Maria was a natural disaster, it was God’s will.
But Guterres offered those gathered a different viewpoint. “These disasters, they are largely due not to God’s will but to what the people on the planet are doing. ...The people on this planet have not been taking care of this planet and especially the developed world.”
Guterres said he knows that there are non-believers when it comes to climate change. But even though President Trump seems intent on having the U.S. exit the Paris climate accord and Monday’s decision will make it difficult for the U.S. to curb emissions, Guterres said he remains hopeful.
“There is a strong commitment of the American society to make sure that the engagement the U.S. assumed in Paris will be met,” he said. “And this gives me a lot of optimism. It’s one thing what the government decides, but it’s another thing what a society will do.”
Seeing the devastation of Irma and Maria up close only reinforced his feelings.
“It confirms everything I felt,” he said, as the plane approached Guadeloupe. “When you see this level of destruction, you feel a huge sense of solidarity with these people. They do not contribute to climate change, but they are the first victims of climate change. It’s a moral responsibility that is very, very important for me. I feel reassured that I am doing the right thing.”
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Tony Abbott dares us to reject evidence on climate, but reveals a coward.
The former Australian prime minister’s misleading speech to a London thinktank was full of climate denial mythology.
Tony Abbott titled his London speech on climate change “Daring to Doubt” – a challenge, if you will, to reject mountains of evidence and instead lick your fingers and shove them into the plug socket of denial.
Go on, I dare you.
Throughout his speech, the former Australian prime minister urged listeners to think that dismissing decades of research backed by the world’s leading scientific institutions required bravery and fortitude, rather than other less celebrated human attributes.
But what would constitute bravery for a conservative politician like Abbott? Changing your mind when the evidence tells you you’re dead wrong, or saying what you’ve always said, using the logical fallacies that you’ve always used? One step is brave, the other is cowardly.
Abbott was giving the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s annual lecture – an “honour” previously bestowed on his spiritual and political mentors John Howard and Cardinal George Pell.
Nobody should be surprised that what we got was an absolute crap speech from a man who confessed he still thinks climate science is “absolute crap”.
Abbott went for the whole canon of tired climate science denial talking points – carbon dioxide is just food for plants, the climate has always changed, it’s the sun – in what constituted a warmed-up meal of misinformation with a side order of supercilious gravy.
Several leading Australian climate scientists have hit back. How tired they must get of debunking this stuff.
Abbott’s speech was also chock-full of internal contradictions.
He suggested a conspiracy to tamper with temperature readings, but admitted the globe was warming. He described carbon dioxide as a “trace gas” and dismissed its role in warming, but elsewhere thought warming (which might not be happening) would be good. And the “trace gas” is insignificant, but not when it comes to its ability to “green the planet” and help plants grow.
Professor Steve Sherwood, deputy director of the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, read the speech and said it was “the usual mix of misdirection, falsehoods and tirades against ‘brigades’ who supposedly say this and that but are never clearly identified”.
Abbott told the thinktank – which had denied requests from seasoned climate reporters to attend – that past climate changes that occurred millions of years ago showed there was nothing to worry about now.
“Abbott is trying to hide the fact that it is the scientists themselves – who know more about past climate changes than he does – who are sounding the alarm,” said Sherwood.
The former prime minister confined his scientific missteps to seven or eight paragraphs in the middle of his speech.
Professor Mark Howden, director of the ANU Climate Change Institute, said Abbott’s claim that other factors, such as sunspots cycles or wobbles in the Earth’s orbit could be just as important as carbon dioxide, was simply false.
“The evidence that our climate is changing due to human activity is overwhelming,” said Howden. “2016 was globally the hottest year on record, surpassing the 2015 record, surpassing the 2014 record. There is 99.999% certainty that humans are driving the observed temperature rises via greenhouse gas emissions.”
Abbott’s claim that “no big change has accompanied the increase in carbon dioxide concentration” was “problematic”, said Howden, given “research shows that the world has already warmed by approximately 1C since pre-industrial times”.
“We are already experiencing changed patterns of rainfall, more and more days with extreme temperatures, increasingly intense natural disasters and rising sea levels, impacting on almost all facets of life in Australia.”
Professor Andrew Pitman, director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, said while it was true that CO2 is essential to life, “life also requires many trace elements that at higher concentrations are toxic”.
“It is a myth to imply that because CO2 is essential to life, more of it is good.”
Abbott also deployed another favourite talking point from climate science misinformers – that warming (which, remember, he thinks might not be happening) will cut the number of people dying of cold.
Pitman said this argument, too, was misleading, saying: “It is true that in rich countries which tend to be in the mid to higher latitudes, some warming might help reduce deaths from cold. In the lower latitude countries – the subtropics and tropics – people rarely die of cold. In contrast they die of heat and lack of clean water.
“So, countries responsible for global warming might gain a minor benefit from warming while those least responsible will wear the consequences.”
Dr Liz Hanna, an expert on the impacts of climate change on human health, said human-caused warming was already implicated in the deaths of many thousands.
“In 2003, 70,000 people died in western Europe, and in 2010 a further 55,000 people died in Russia and eastern Europe. These figures far exceed deaths from cold snaps. The decade 2001-2010 saw a 2,300% increase in heat deaths above the previous decade. Mr Abbott’s assertions don’t tell the whole story, as they’re based on what has happened in the past rather than what is projected to happen in future. While more people die from cold than heat in Melbourne at the moment, this will reverse as more summer days reach the high 40s.”
Away from his errors on the evidence, Abbott tried to characterise climate science and environmentalism as being hamstrung by a religious-type fervour that gets in the way of “common sense”. Abbott said:
Environmentalism has managed to combine a post-socialist instinct for big government with a post-Christian nostalgia for making sacrifices in a good cause. Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We’re more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect.
Beware the pronouncement, ‘the science is settled’. It’s the spirit of the Inquisition, the thought-police down the ages. Almost as bad is the claim that ‘99% of scientists believe’ as if scientific truth is determined by votes rather than facts.
As a Roman Catholic libertarian free market ideologue, Abbott is, presumably, immune to such group think.
Climate scientist Ben Henley, of the University of Melbourne, also spots Abbott’s facile argument. In an email he told me:
“By implication, Abbott superstitiously questions the foundations of science, and in doing so, he questions the same scientific method which discovered wifi and penicillin, and proved the Earth was not flat.
“Abbott presents an absurdly and intentionally distorted viewpoint, reminiscent of a conspiracy theorist.”
Abbott’s attitude to climate change seems to rest on a Boy’s Own “who dares wins” approach to policy that’s neither brave or daring. It’s stupid.
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Puerto Ricans still desperate for water weeks after Hurricane Maria.
Half of the island’s residents have no access to clean drinking water.
Puerto Ricans Still Desperate for Water Weeks after Hurricane Maria
October 9, 2017/in Drinking Water, United States, Water News, Water Quality /by Kayla Ritter
Half of the island’s residents have no access to clean drinking water.
Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico. (Photo by Sgt. Jose Ahiram Diaz-Ramos/PRNG-PAO)
The Rundown
Two weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, islanders are still in dire need of water and other amenities such as food, fuel, and medicine. The arrival of aid to the island has been sluggish, and its delivery is being obstructed by widespread damages to infrastructure alongside downed electricity and cell service. Although the island has seen some areas of improvement—over 70 percent of supermarkets and gas stations are now operational—conditions remain grave following the worst hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in 90 years.
“Well, at least the water arrived — that’s a first. That’s for today. I guess tomorrow we have to come back. The people here were waiting, and it was not coming. We were so desperate.” –Aida Nieves, a resident of Cánovanas, Puerto Rico, in reference to the arrival of aid after two weeks of waiting. Nieves received two meals and a 24-pack of bottled water to sustain her household of eight people indefinitely. Other residents of the island, especially those living in isolated inland areas, are still waiting for basic amenities.
By The Numbers
34 The latest Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rico, according to a Tuesday update by Governor Ricardo Roselló. Nineteen deaths were due to drowning, mudslides or falling objects; the rest of the deaths were caused indirectly by heart attack, suicide, or power outages that cut off oxygen or other life-saving assistance at hospitals. The Governor warned that the death toll may continue to rise.
53 percent Proportion of Puerto Ricans who do not have access to clean drinking water as of Tuesday. Many residents have resorted to fetching water from streams and rivers to meet their daily needs. In San Juan, a bottle of water reportedly costs $6.
91 percent Proportion of Puerto Rican homes and businesses that remain without power as of Wednesday. Governor Roselló expects that 75 percent will still be without electricity a month from now.
88 percent Proportion of islanders who do not have cell service as of Wednesday. A Department of Defense press release on hurricane relief efforts reported that “communications remain a challenge.” AT&T; mobile cell towers are being delivered to Puerto Rico in an effort to regain connectivity.
51 Number of Puerto Rico’s hospitals that are relying on generator power, compared to 14 hospitals with functioning electricity. A floating U.S. Navy hospital ship has arrived in San Juan to aid storm victims.
Science, Studies, And Reports
The U.S. Department of Defense is publishing daily reports on disaster relief efforts on the island. The DoD’s Wednesday update emphasized the military’s efforts to clear roads and rebuild bridges in order to distribute aid to all Puerto Rico residents. More than 10,000 DoD personnel are on the ground and eighty military aircraft are flying supplies around the island.
On The Radar
Over half of Puerto Ricans are without drinking water, and the potential for waterborne diseases is on the rise. Unfortunately, this is not the first issue Puerto Rico has had with its water supply. Even before Hurricane Maria, the island had the highest rate of drinking water violations of any state or territory. In 2015, over 60 percent of islanders got their water from sources that violated federal health standards. Crumbling infrastructure, pollution, and underinvestment are largely to blame. Now that Hurricane Maria has dealt another blow to Puerto Rico’s fragile water supply, the Puerto Rican government must commit to rebuilding water infrastructure in a sustainable way, or else water issues will continue to plague the island for decades to come.
Resources And Further Reading
After Hurricane Maria, 95 percent of Puerto Rico still without power (ABC News)
Aid Is Getting to Puerto Rico. Distributing It Remains a Challenge. (The New York Times)
Higher Puerto Rico Death Toll Reflects Survey Across Island (The New York Times)
Hurricane Maria worsens Puerto Rico’s water woes (The Hill)
Trump praises response to Puerto Rico, says crisis straining budget (Reuters)
With little food, water or power, Puerto Rico residents say ‘no one has come’ to help (ABC News)
With long lines for food, water and fuel, Puerto Ricans help each other (USA Today)
DoD Hurricane Relief (Defense.gov)
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Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction.
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off.
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off
Jane Dalton @IndyVoices Sunday 8 October 2017 00:00 BST
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The Independent Online
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“Chip is much more popular than me everywhere we go,” Chris Darwin says, jovially co-operating by posing for photos with the toy bald eagle he carries on his shoulder. “I nicked him from my children’s bedroom and he gets lots of attention.”
To meet Mr Darwin, laidback, cheerful and ultra-friendly, you would never guess he tried to commit suicide 26 years ago. He’s perfectly open about it, as much as he is passionate about his new work that sprang from the famous surname.
Mr Darwin’s great, great grandfather, Charles, may have developed the theory of the origin of species but today his descendant has picked up the evolutionary science baton to defend mass extinctions of species.
“We all have crucibles,” he says of the dark period when, aged 30, he tried to end his life by cycling over a cliff (he was saved by a random tree branch). “Critical moments when something normally bad happens that changes the rest of your life, and mine was this suicide event. Slowly I came to the concept that I needed purpose in life.”
Darwin the younger looked at all the world’s big problems – starvation, polluted water, disease – and settled on the crisis of mass extinctions as one he felt he wanted to help tackle. “So in 1991 I set off down that road.”
Bird man: Chris Darwin is making it his mission to halt wildlife decline (Jane Dalton)
When asked to what extent he was influenced by his legendary ancestor’s work in identifying the origins of man, he bursts into a roar of laughter. “It was entirely independent,” he insists in a voice heavy with irony.
Chris Darwin, 56, had come to London from his home in Australia for a groundbreaking conference attempting to tackle the growing crisis of the world’s rapidly diminishing wildlife, and one of the key causes of that loss – worldwide demand for meat.
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More than 50 of the best minds in the fields of ecology, agriculture, public health, biology, oceanography, eco-investment and food retailing joined forces over two days to brainstorm ideas on how to stem the rapid shrinkage of the natural world caused by damaging agricultural practices.
The Extinction and Livestock Conference, with at least 500 delegates, was the world’s first ever conference examining how modern meat production affects life on Earth, and, put simply, it was designed to find ways to revolutionise the world’s food and farming systems to prevent mass species extinctions.
“We have to stop this,” says Mr Darwin, and he recalls how his great, great grandfather regretted on his death not having done more for other animals – a sentiment that shaped his decision to turn around his “self-indulgent, selfish” life, which involved working in advertising, and do something for the planet.
Wildlife under attack
The fact that the food on our plates is a major cause of shocking declines in wildlife – ranging from elephants and jaguar to barn owls, water vole and bumble bees – may come as a surprise to many. But for the experts gathered for the conference the link was clear. What was less easy to see was how to force practical global change.
Nobody can be in any doubt about the alarming rate at which animals, reptiles and birds are becoming extinct. The journal Science says we are wiping out species at 1,000 times their natural rate.
In the past 40 years alone half the world’s wildlife species have been lost, with conservation giant the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) predicting Earth is on course to lose two-thirds of its species within the next three years.
Marco Lambertini, director-general of WWF International, could not have put it more starkly: “Lose biodiversity, and the natural world – including the life-support systems as we know them – will collapse.”
Changing our spots: if we don't change our diets then animals, such as jaguar, face extinction (AFP/Getty)
The depth of the crisis was underlined earlier this year when scientists announced we were already living through an era of the world’s sixth mass extinction – caused by human activity. What was happening was so urgent, they warned, it should be termed not “mass extinction” but “biological annihilation”.
The researchers revealed, in the journal Nature, their findings that tens of thousands of species – including a quarter of all mammals and 13 per cent of birds – are now threatened with extinction. The researchers, who studied 27,600 species, said: “Dwindling population sizes and range-shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilisation.”
And it’s not just land mammals that are disappearing. Last year a study in the journal Science suggested sharks, whales and sea turtles were dying in disproportionately greater numbers than smaller animals – the reverse of earlier extinctions.
The link with food
Climate change and hunting are usually blamed for declines in the natural world but at Extinction Conference 17, WWF revealed fresh research showing 60 per cent of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets.
Its report, Appetite for Destruction, laid bare how the vast scale of cereals and soya grown specifically to feed animals farmed for meat is soaking up great tracts of land, taking huge quantities of fresh water and eliminating wild species.
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What’s more, the study says, the world is consuming more animal protein than it needs: the average UK consumption of protein is between 64g and 88g, compared with guidelines of 45g-55g. Poultry such as chicken and duck are the biggest users of crop feed worldwide, with pigs second.
One study found that 60 per cent of EU cereal production (and 67 per cent in the US) is used as animal feed – yet for every 100 calories fed to animals as crops, we receive on average just 17-30 calories in the form of meat and milk.
It's a jungle out there: deforestation for food production is a massive problem (AFP/Getty)
According to the charity Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), the destructive practices were set in train after the Second World War, when intensive farming techniques spread from the US to Europe. Vast landscapes were replaced by “monoculture” – a single crop – in fields liberally treated with pesticides and fertilisers. They killed the insects, bees and butterflies at the bottom of the food chain and wiped away bird habitats, while active deforestation for food production is leaving ever smaller landscapes for mammals, from jaguar and elephants to polar bears and rhinos.
It’s happening in exotic locations – such as Indonesia, where the palm oil industry wrecks habitats and leads to elephants, porcupine and wild pigs being poisoned – and closer to home, where decades of use of nitrogen and other chemicals on farms has led to dire warnings about Britain’s soil having fewer than 100 harvests left.
But worldwide, the overwhelming problem, experts say, is the highly inefficient use of land to grow soya and cereals that are then fed to chickens, pigs and cattle slaughtered for meat.
According to The Economist, although livestock provides just 17 per cent of global calories consumed, it requires twice that proportion of the Earth’s fresh water, feed and farmland because of the crops required. And this makes it the greatest user of land in the world.
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Philip Lymbery, chief executive of CiWF, which organised the conference, set out the causal links between modern intensive farming practices and the destruction of the natural world in his book Dead Zone, which explains how intensive rearing of animals in Britain and abroad to produce meat cheaply involves destroying forests half the size of the UK for farmland each year.
In South America, rainforests have been replaced by swathes of soya crops to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. Some 13 million hectares there – about the size of Greece – are used for soya imported by the EU, nearly all for industrial feed, according to WWF.
The system is so inefficient, says Lymbery, that “worldwide, if grain-fed animals were restored to pasture and the cereals and soya went to people instead, there would be enough for an extra four billion people”. Feeding animals on crops that are fit for humans is “the biggest single area of food waste on the planet”.
Sting in the tail: use of pesticides in fields is one of the factors leading to a decline in bees (CiWF)
“Many people claim factory farming is the answer to feeding a burgeoning population but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says.
Intensively grazed landscapes, with fertilisers and pesticides and the demise of stubble, have led to steep declines in barn owls and other farmland birds and small mammals, while chemical run-off from fields is seen as a key cause of bee decline.
CiWF is not the only voice linking extinctions with our diets. The UN has stated that “intensive livestock production is probably the largest sector-specific source of water pollution”. The Soil Association says the UK’s food system accounts for 30 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of industrialised processes.
And WWF has warned: “We could witness a two-thirds decline in the half-century from 1970 to 2020, unless we act now to reform our food and energy systems and meet global commitments on addressing climate change, protecting biodiversity and supporting sustainable development.”
Solutions
Seven years ago, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drew up a strategic plan, signed by 196 countries, of detailed targets for 2020 to slow wildlife decline. Since then scientists have repeatedly warned not just that the targets would be missed but also that biodiversity loss was worsening. The lack of action was one factor behind the Extinction Conference.
Lymbery said it should be the start of a “global conversation” on transforming food and farming worldwide, and called for a fresh UN convention. “To safeguard the future, we need some kind of global agreement to replace factory farming with a regenerative food system. But that’s not all. We all have the power, three times a day, to save wildlife and end an awful lot of farm animal cruelty.”
Mucking in: We have it in our power to prevent factory farming – by changing our behaviour (AFP/Getty)
Duncan Williamson, of WWF, proposed feeding farm animals on specially cultivated insects and algae, to dramatically reduce deforestation and water use needed as animal feed.
Food producers, meanwhile, showcased a new vegan burger that “sizzles and bleeds like meat”, endorsed by Joanna Lumley, the star of Absolutely Fabulous.
Less meat
Time and again, the solutions by conference experts led to a need to end industrial animal farming – which meant animal campaigners were suddenly no longer the only ones urging people to scale back drastically the amount of chicken, pork, beef, salmon, dairy and eggs consumed.
Chris Darwin, who spent six weeks on a container ship travelling to Britain to avoid flying, said: “Verifiable evidence indicates meat consumption globally will double in the next 35 years, and if that occurs so much forest will have to be cut down around the world that we’re going to cause a mass extinction of species within the next hundred years. And we cannot let that happen.”
He explained passionately how a typical diet uses “two-and-a-half planets” in terms of resources but cutting out wasteful animal produce uses “a quarter of the planet”.
Cut it out: Rainforests are being chopped down and replaced by soya crops (AFP/Getty Images)
He is using modern technology that would have astounded his great, great grandfather to fight back against the seemingly relentless decline of the natural world – in the form of an iPhone app helping people to switch to a more plant-based diet.
By tapping in what they eat, people can receive feedback over time on how many animals, carbon emissions and how much land and water they have saved, as well as days of lifespan added, and their placing on a leaderboard.
“What is the single silver bullet to solve this problem?” he says. “We need behavioural change to solve this problem – and that is to eat less meat.”
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A lack of action on climate change is putting people's lives at risk.
In the 2014 Melbourne heatwave, 167 people died. Emergency departments can’t deal with this problem alone.
A new study warning Australia’s major cities are likely to reach highs of 50C by 2040 – even if the world meets its target of limiting warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels – is yet more evidence that without immediate and urgent action we are facing a looming public health crisis during heatwaves and other extreme weather events.
The study follows recent unseasonable heat across New South Wales, with Sydney experiencing its hottest ever September day, as well as the doubling of record-breaking summer temperatures in Australia in the past 50 years. This new normal has hospital health professionals particularly bracing for the coming summer.
Public Australian emergency departments are tough places to both work and be a patient. They are hectic, often overwhelmed, not infrequently threatening environments that are emotionally demanding for everyone. And, with ever increasing demand and an ageing population, along with a politically-sensitive health budget, the emergency department is increasingly the public face of a stressed health system.
Every day, sometime around 11am, the ambulances roll in. This is when we see the presentation rate suddenly increase, commonly bringing a new patient every three to four minutes, a rate that will continue until 10-11pm every evening. Generally during this 11 to 12 hour period we see two-thirds of our presentations. This is the time that the department heaves.
During this period, on any given day, the resuscitation area will be full. A delirious elderly patient with septicaemia will be lying alongside someone with chest pain who may be next to a psychotic methamphetamine-intoxicated patient screaming abuse as they are restrained by security and clinical staff, while a full resuscitation of an out of hospital cardiac arrest or a major trauma takes place in a nearby bay.
Monitor alarms will be going off continuously, the sounds broken by an ambulance priority-one call coming through, while medical and nursing staff will be moving from one patient to the next as quickly as possible, trying to keep on top of the deteriorating patients around them. And soon enough ambulances will be banking up outside the front door as the department exceeds its capacity to deal with the influx, kept from being on the road responding to emergencies as they wait to offload their patients.
While all this is going on, the inpatient units are being pushed to discharge as many patients, as early as possible in the day, to make capacity for the admissions that will come, both as emergency and elective surgical patients. All of this has to happen, has to work to an optimal level to deal with the demand of any usual day in our public health system.
Are we going to take the health of our population and our ecosystem seriously ...?
Now let us add to this day three of a heatwave (defined as three or more days of high maximum temperatures). With climate change causing a gradual increase in average temperatures, we know that heatwaves are more frequent and of increasing severity.
What we also know from the heatwaves we have seen in Australia thus far is that we can expect a very significant impact on our public health system. Increases of up to 25% for ambulance emergency call outs; up to 60% increase in emergency department resuscitation cases, often in the elderly and vulnerable members of our society; an overall increase in presentations to our already overstretched emergency departments; and an increase in overall deaths ranging from 13% to 24%. In the 2014 Melbourne heatwave, that equated to 167 excess deaths.
One hundred and sixty seven deaths. If that had been a fire, or explosion, or heaven forbid a terrorist attack, it would be a national disaster that would be in the public eye for days. Yet it will happen reliably with every major heatwave event, and we barely bat an eyelid.
These issues are discussed in an article in the current edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, which I co-authored with former Australian of the Year, Professor Fiona Stanley, and public health physician, Dr Marion Carey.
And it is not just these direct consequences that are significant. There is always a huge demand on public hospital beds, many hospitals running at or beyond a level of occupancy that allows for efficient systems. What this means is that even without additional burdens such as heatwaves, it is a constant struggle to create capacity for those who need admission. Events such as heatwaves only exacerbate this pressure, resulting in reduced access for all patients, not just those affected by heat-related illness.
So, with the prospect of increasing extreme weather along with the so many other challenges of climate change we have some serious questions to address.
Are we going to take the health of our population and our ecosystem seriously and do everything we can to mitigate the inevitable increase in ambient temperature? How do we minimise the completely unacceptable mortality rates that we are already seeing, and what do we do to invest in our health systems to cope with what will be an ever increasing burden?
These are challenges that require immediate, mid and long-term solutions, challenges that we need to see taken seriously by the government of the day.
Dr Mark Monaghan is an emergency physician and a member of Doctors for the Environment Australia
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Puerto Rico hurricane crisis: Here's why this could be Trump's Katrina.
Empathy helps. As does, well, actual help.
It's been one week since Category 4 Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, destroying the entire island's communications infrastructure, power grid, and leaving thousands homeless. The humanitarian crisis in the storm's wake is growing by the hour.
Local officials on the island have been pleading for more help from the Trump administration, with San Juan's mayor calling for layers of red tape to be eliminated in order to better distribute aid to inland areas that have effectively been cut off from the rest of the island.
“This is a big S.O.S for anybody out there,” Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night, “a plea for this help, which is right here, to get moving.”
Cruz said many rescuers on the ground were waiting for orders of where and how to respond.
“The red tape needs to be ripped off as if it were a band aid,” she said, “there are boots on the ground... but those boots need to start walking.”
While the federal government has been scaling up its response by dispatching Navy and Coast Guard vessels to the island, along with up to 3,000 troops and aircraft carrying food, water, and other supplies, help is not arriving fast enough.
Much of the aid that has been brought in has been stranded in ports or at the airport because delivery trucks don't have any gas, and port infrastructure is in bad shape.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump gave himself high marks for his administration's storm response, but the reality is that moving the island from crisis mode to a decade-long rebuilding phase is far more complicated than anything Trump has dealt with so far, including Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which were also Category 4 storms at landfall in the U.S.
Trump being Trump
The optics of this storm don't favor Trump. First, there's the fact that he never mentioned Puerto Rico's plight during the weekend, choosing instead to ignite a battle, via Twitter of course, with NFL players over their protests of police brutality and other issues.
Then when he finally did tweet about Puerto Rico, it was to remind Americans of what sorry shape the island was in prior to the storm, almost as if to absolve himself of the responsibility to save people's lives.
Then his comments during the Tuesday press conference in the Rose Garden may turn out to be his "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie," moment.
On a day when cable networks were broadcasting images of flooded streets, aerial shots of devastated homes, and desperate pleas for assistance from Puerto Rican officials, Trump insisted that he was receiving nothing but praise for his administration's storm response.
"As [Puerto Rican] governor Rossello just told me this morning, the entire federal workforce is doing great work in Puerto Rico, and I appreciated his saying it, and he's saying it to anybody that will listen," Trump said.
"And he [Rossello] further went on, he said, 'And through the Trump administration's leadership, the relationship between FEMA and my team is very, very strong.'"
It wasn't until Wednesday, six days after the storm struck, that he even tried to empathize with storm victims. Empathy, after all, isn't something that this president excels at.
"I mean, that place was just destroyed," Trump said. "That is a really tough situation. I feel so badly for the people."
The current situation bears eerie similarities to George W. Bush’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, which helped derail his second term. Like Trump, Bush appeared out of touch as the crisis grew, staying at his Texas Ranch during the storm, and then taking a now-infamous Air Force One flyby of a flooded American city. Trump, for his part, plans to visit Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands next Tuesday, about 2 weeks after this humanitarian crisis began.
As with Puerto Rico, there was a racial component to Katrina as well, with majority black neighborhoods hardest hit by the flooding. Trump, who spent the weekend disparaging black members of the NFL and NBA, is seen by many as not caring about Puerto Ricans because he sees them as some sort of “other,” while Bush was tarnished with the reputation of, in Kanye West’s blunt words, not caring about black people.
And from an on the ground perspective, as with New Orleans, Puerto Rico is in such dire shape post-Hurricane Maria that even as more aid comes in, officials are having trouble ensuring it gets to where it is needed most.
FEMA is stretched thin
There's a lot of strain being placed on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which is in charge of responding to disasters such as Hurricane Maria. At the same time, FEMA has personnel in Texas and Florida who are still working to respond to requests for aid from the first-ever back-to-back Category 4 storms to hit the U.S. in a single hurricane season.
Hurricane Harvey alone, which made landfall in Texas on August 25, may become the single most expensive storm on record in the U.S., while Hurricane Irma is also expected to cost well into the tens of billions, as well.
In fact, FEMA has never faced such a tall challenge before, with the task of responding to three Category 4 hurricanes hitting multiple U.S. states and territories in less than a month. The agency may train for even worse situations, such as a terrorist attack using a weapon of mass destruction, but these storms have been unprecedented in its history, dating back to FEMA's creation in 1979.
"I don’t believe there has been anything even remotely close to this over the last few decades that FEMA’s existed,” said Jeff Schlegelmilch, the deputy director of Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
Political headwinds
The fact that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, rather than a full-fledged state, may explain part of the hesitation in Washington's response to the crisis. President Trump, for example, did not mention the storm damage at all despite his prolific tweeting over the weekend. When he finally did address the situation, it was in a series of tweets Monday night that paid more attention to Puerto Rico's debt than the ongoing suffering of its people.
The 3.4 million residents of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens, but they lack a congressional delegation that can vote in either chamber. That limits the island's ability to marshall support for an aid package.
“They have the added disadvantage where they don’t have representation in the U.S. Congress," Schlegelmilch said. "There’s no electoral incentive to put this on the agenda,” he said.
Nowhere is this lack of incentive more evident than in President Trump's refusal to lift the Jones Act, a 1920 law that is limiting the ability of foreign-registered shippers to bring in aid to Puerto Rico and
Some lawmakers, notably Arizona Senator John McCain, are pushing for the president to waive the Jones Act, which would allow foreign ships to bring in aid to Puerto Rico more cheaply. The law requires foreign-registered vessels to pay tariffs and fees upon entering Puerto Rico. These fees in turn raise the cost of goods, such as gasoline, in Puerto Rico, but they help protect U.S. shipping companies from competition.
On Wednesday, Trump said he's hesitating on the Jones Act waiver, which has been done after previous storms, because of pressure from the shipping industry.
"Well, we're thinking about that but we have a lot of shippers and a lot of people and a lot of people that work in the shipping industry that don't want the Jones Act lifted, and we have a lot of ships out there right now," Trump said.
Island needs help in order to accept more help
The poor state of the island's infrastructure prior to the storm, and the widespread destruction in the hurricane's wake, means that Puerto Rico is not equipped to take advantage of a rapid, large-scale aid effort.
Schlegelmilch said FEMA is applying the same response model to Puerto Rico that it successfully did for Texas, Florida and other states hit by the earlier storms. However, this may be insufficient, given the enormity of the destruction on the island, its geographical isolation, and the complicated politics involved in assisting a U.S. territory that lacks voting members of Congress.
“They’re applying the model for Harvey and Irma but Maria was a much more catastrophic storm,” he said. “The isolation of Puerto Rico is so much greater."
“The level of devastation to the infrastructure is still not fully understood,” he said, noting that many of the resources being sent to the island may not help right away. "The capacity of Puerto Rico to support the response and to absorb the assets” has been damaged, he said.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Energy Department said the majority of the 1.57 million electricity customers in Puerto Rico were without power, with efforts underway to restore electricity access for critical facilities, such as hospitals. "Initial assessments show significant damage to transmission and distribution systems," the report stated.
Schlegelmilch said it may be more appropriate for the U.S. military to take a lead role in coordinating and shipping supplies to Puerto Rico, rather than FEMA.
Puerto Rico needs cash
Trump was not wrong in saying that Puerto Rico is facing a debt crisis, considering the island owes about $70 billion to creditors.
Over the years, the island tried to make up for a loss in revenue by borrowing and making deals with U.S. hedge funds, which turned out to be a terrible idea. One of the hardest hit entities on the island, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or Prepa, also owes about $9 billion, which helped degrade its system before the storm hit.
The debt crisis, degraded infrastructure, and poverty found in Puerto Rico made it more vulnerable to a disaster like Hurricane Maria. In some ways, the storm may be an opportunity to rebuild the island in a more resilient way, so it will better withstand the next major hurricane that comes along.
But this can only be accomplished if the Trump administration decides to invest in such an endeavor, like it is in Texas and Florida. We don’t know if that’s the case, since Trump has yet to ask Congress for a disaster funding package. It only took a few days for him to take that step with the other two storms.
That’s not a good sign.
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