Puerto Rico has been hit by hurricanes in the past. Before Ian hit Florida, we were without critical services like electricity, water, hospitals and fuel supplies, thanks to the crash of the plane named "Fiona". Five years ago, Hurricane Mara caused $90 billion in damage. As we recover from another destructive Hurricane, our leaders have ignored the planning and preparation lessons that were made clear by Mara.
The United States federal and Puerto Rico local governments promised an increased level of resilience after Mara. The strategy to build resilience in Puerto Rico is wrong and the leaders who preach it are making decisions based on the wrong things. Private companies can't provide resilience. The archipelago will benefit from rethinking how we approach planning and preparation.
As the climate crisis threatens more intense storms and hurricanes, it will be if government at all levels doesn't start responding differently. An organized response based on community and civil society solutions would have been a better choice. We have seen the effects of local engagement on building resilience in our communities when we worked on environmental, social and energy justice projects. Community participation and leadership will be required to prepare for the next storm. The damage fromFiona would have been less severe if leaders at all levels had planned for it.
In Puerto Rico, a distributed/local response has shown promise as an alternative. In Puerto Rico, residents and businesses are using rooftop solar and battery energy storage as a local resilience solution through grants from nonprofits. Smaller-scale projects could have been put in place by the federal and local governments. They supported large-scale solar projects with little or no citizen involvement.
Puerto Rico had problems before the storm even hit. Luma Energy, the private operator of the island's electricity, failed to maintain vegetation near power lines and failed in the maintenance of key grid components. The promises made by politicians that a privatized operation of the grid would be better than a public utility have not held up. Damage from trees and other debris, as well as failures in key power lines, were caused by the winds of the storm.
It took Luma more time to restore power to 90 percent of its clients in Puerto Rico than it did to restore power after Ian. Even with billions of dollars approved for energy resilience programs after Hurricane Mara, the electric infrastructure is still so weak that a tropical storm turned into a full-scale power failure.
The lack of power was felt outside. There were many emergency generators deployed by the water company that didn't work. Water purification and treatment facilities rely on electricity to function, so when there was no power, drinking water was not available. There was a shortage of diesel fuel after Mara. Hospitals couldn't get diesel for their generators. Puerto Rico quickly became an unlivable place after the death toll rose and urgent medical care was canceled.
Households and businesses that had rooftop solar and battery energy storage systems were able to continue to operate. There is a lot of support for rooftop solar in Puerto Rico, but it is not enough to transform the electric grid. Disaster recovery funds should be prioritized for distributed renewable energy projects. They should be the main actors in identifying, designing, implementing, evaluating and maintaining processes and distributed/local solutions if we want to serve the most vulnerable.
There is not a single solution to the resilience challenge. There isn't a single discipline or approach that can comprehend it all. In Puerto Rico and other areas prone to hurricanes, there is strong evidence that grassroots initiatives and community-based approaches work. Decentralizing critical services and implementing community-driven alternatives are two things that should be done with the $10 billion in disaster recovery funding.
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