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Case Study: Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria

Differential response and recovery times across U.S. communities hit by 2017 storms

The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season went down in history as having the most named storms since 2005. In 2005 there were 28 named storms and 15 of them becoming hurricanes, while in 2017 there were 17 named storms and 10 of these became hurricanes. The three most notable out of these storms – Harvey (landfall on August 25 in Texas), Irma (Landfall September 10 in Florida) and Maria, (Landfall on September 20 in Puerto Rico) followed in close succession and broke records for their intensity in the places they impacted.

Maria achieved its peak intensity over the eastern Caribbean and made landfall in Yabucao, southeastern Puerto Rico as a strong category 4 storm, where winds of 175 mph (280 km/h) were recorded. It was the first Category 4 hurricane to directly impact the island in 85 years, and it caused widespread damage that was felt for months, if not years.

Prior to Maria’s landfall, hundreds of shelters were set up, and evacuation orders were given. An uptick in travel from the island just before the storm was indicative of the numbers of people fleeing to the U.S. mainland to stay with family.

Compounding the impacts of Maria on the island was the damage from Category 5 Hurricane Irma just 2 weeks prior, especially to the electrical grid, which was crippled by Maria, leaving all 3.4 million residents without electricity for an extended period. Six months after the storm, many were still without power and had not been able to repair their houses. In fact, the combined impacts of hurricanes Irma and Maria resulted in Puerto Rico Electrical Power Authority (PREPA) filing for bankruptcy. Imagine all the functions that are impossible without power, besides the misery of living in a tropical climate without any means to refrigerate food or enjoy air-conditioning. All means of modern communication are impossible because cell phone towers are one of the first things to be destroyed by the high winds of a major storm.

The number of people killed by Hurricane Maria proved challenging to count. An initial number of 65 deaths directly attributable to the storm was officially recorded by the federal government. This number did not account for those whose deaths were from indirect causes linked to the hurricane, due to deprivation caused by things like lack of power and medical services and a multitude of other causes during the response and recovery phases. Six months after Maria’s landfall, an estimate of 2,975 indirect deaths was made by examining the mortality rate for that time period compared to the same period during previous years. The sensitive populations – the elderly, the very young, and the sick - suffer the most in the immediate aftermath of a disaster like a hurricane, and it is among these groups that the most deaths occurred in Maria.

Residents of the U.S. territory were able to apply for aid through FEMA, but reports indicated that supplies moved slowly to destinations, hampering recovery. In November 2017, two months after the storm, 60% were still without power and perhaps 20% without water, so that many had to collect water from streams and rainwater. Many stories in the media at the six-month mark highlighted the misery of a slow recovery. There was a lack of adequate infrastructure repair, medical services, and the simple availability of supplies throughout this time, although many charity organizations supported the effort.

An objective study by BMJ Global Health: Quantifying inequities in US federal response to hurricane disaster in Texas and Florida compared with Puerto Rico , investigated the question of whether the federal response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was significantly smaller and slower than the responses to Hurricane Irma in Florida and Hurricane Harvey in Texas. Their conclusion was that the response to Maria was indeed lacking and did not align with the storm severity or the needs of the affected communities. They note that “Increases in mortality and adverse health outcomes due to differentiated disaster response and recovery efforts may promote inequity among populations that receive less aid.” In other words, Puerto Rico did not receive the same level of aid as Texas and Florida after Harvey and Irma respectively, and the people of Puerto Rico suffered as a result. They go on to suggest reasons for this in this way: “There may be many different reasons why the federal response varied in each case. Ability to access the affected area based on geography and distance, existing infrastructure aiding or acting as barriers to response efforts, disaster fatigue, as well as issues of racial bias and perceptions of differential citizenship all may have affected the appropriation and delivery of resources and funding to affected areas in each hurricane. Different mechanisms for the varied responses may be more or less justified. However, what cannot be contested is that the responses were in fact different across critical time points, and these differences have serious consequences for acute and long-term health outcomes and recovery efforts.”

The data in the report clearly show a disparity in the amount of aid received and the time taken for aid to be received. This article highlights the critical nature of getting aid to its target in a timely manner. Slow responses lead to serious negative outcomes, as Puerto Rican residents can attest. Be sure to read Echoes of Katrina: Post-Maria Public Health Threats and Trauma .

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A coral pollution study unexpectedly helped explain hurricane maria’s fury.

A fire hose effect kept the water surface hot around Puerto Rico, fueling the storm’s intensity

Yasmin Morales stands in what’s left of her home in the eastern part of Puerto Rico in September 2017 after Hurricane Maria battered the island.

HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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By Martin J. Kernan

September 7, 2022 at 7:00 am

Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico early on September 20, 2017, with 250-kilometer-per-hour winds, torrential rains and a storm surge up to three meters high. In its wake: nearly 3,000 people dead, an almost yearlong power outage and over $90 billion in damages to homes, businesses and essential infrastructure, including roads and bridges.

Geologist and diver Milton Carlo took shelter at his house in Cabo Rojo on the southwest corner of the island with his wife, daughter and infant grandson. He watched the raging winds of the Category 4 hurricane lift his neighbor’s SUV into the air, and remembers those hours as some of the worst of his life.

For weeks, the rest of the world was in the dark about the full extent of the devastation, because Maria had destroyed the island’s main weather radar and almost all cell phone towers.

Far away on the U.S. West Coast, in Santa Cruz, Calif., oceanographer Olivia Cheriton watched satellite radar images of Maria passing over the instruments she and her U.S. Geological Survey team had anchored a few kilometers southwest of Puerto Rico. The instruments, placed offshore from the seaside town of La Parguera, were there to track pollution circulating around some of the island’s endangered corals.

More than half a year went by before she learned the improbable fate of those instruments: They had survived and had captured data revealing hurricane-related ocean dynamics that no scientist had ever recorded.

The wind-driven coastal currents interacted with the seafloor in a way that prevented Maria from drawing cold water from the depths of the sea up to the surface. The sea surface stayed as warm as bathwater. Heat is a hurricane’s fuel source, so a warmer sea surface leads to a more intense storm. As Cheriton figured out later, the phenomenon she stumbled upon likely played a role in maintaining Maria’s Category 4 status as it raked Puerto Rico for eight hours.

“There was absolutely no plan to capture the impact of a storm like Maria,” Cheriton says. “In fact, if we somehow could’ve known that a storm like that was going to occur, we wouldn’t have put hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of scientific instrumentation in the water.”

A storm’s path is guided by readily observable, large-scale atmospheric features such as trade winds and high-pressure zones. Its intensity, on the other hand, is driven by weather events inside the hurricane and wave action deep below the ocean’s surface. The findings by Cheriton and colleagues, published May 2021 in Science Advances , help explain why hurricanes often get stronger before making landfall and can therefore help forecasters make more accurate predictions.

Reef pollution

Cheriton’s original research objective was to figure out how sea currents transport polluted sediments from Guánica Bay — where the Lajas Valley drains into the Caribbean Sea — to the pristine marine ecosystems 10 kilometers west in La Parguera Natural Reserve, famous for its bioluminescent waters.

Endangered elkhorn and mountainous star corals, called “the poster children of Caribbean reef decline” by marine geologist Clark Sherman, live near shore in some of the world’s highest recorded concentrations of now-banned industrial chemicals. Those polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, hinder coral reproduction, growth, feeding and defensive responses, says Sherman, of the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez.

Half of corals in the Caribbean have died since monitoring began in the 1970s, and pollution is a major cause , according to an April 2020 study in Science Advances . Of particular interest to Cheriton, Sherman and their colleagues was whether the pollution had reached deepwater, or mesophotic, reefs farther offshore, which could be a refuge for coral species that were known to be dying in shallower areas.

The main artery for this pollution is the Rio Loco — which translates to “Crazy River.” It spews a toxic runoff of eroded sediments from the Lajas Valley’s dirt roads and coffee plantations into Guánica Bay, which supports a vibrant fishing community. Other possible contributors to the pollution — oil spills, a fertilizer plant, sewage and now-defunct sugar mills — are the subject of investigations by public health researchers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In June 2017, the team convened in La Parguera to install underwater sensors to measure and track the currents in this threatened marine environment. From Sherman’s lab on a tiny islet overrun with iguanas the size of house cats, he and Cheriton, along with team leader and USGS research geologist Curt Storlazzi and USGS physical scientist Joshua Logan, launched a boat into choppy seas.

At six sites near shore, Storlazzi, Sherman and Logan dove to the seafloor and used epoxy to anchor pressure gauges and batonlike current meters. Together the instruments measured hourly temperature, wave height and current speed. The team then moved farther offshore where the steep island shelf drops off at a 45-degree angle to a depth of 60 meters, but the heavy ocean chop scuttled their efforts to install instruments there.

For help working in the difficult conditions, Sherman enlisted two expert divers for a second attempt: Carlo, the geologist and diving safety officer, and marine scientist Evan Tuohy, both of the University of Puerto Rico–­Mayagüez. The two were able to install the most important and largest piece, a hydroacoustic instrument comprising several drums fastened to a metal grid, which tracked the direction and speed of currents every minute using pulsating sound waves. A canister containing temperature and salinity sensors took readings every two minutes. Above this equipment, an electric thermometer extended to within 12 meters of the surface, registering temperature every five meters vertically every few seconds.

Working in concert, the instruments gave a high-resolution, seafloor-to-surface snapshot of the ocean’s hydrodynamics on a near-continuous basis. The equipment had to sit level on the sloping seafloor so as not to skew the measurements and remain firmly in place. Little did the researchers know that the instruments would soon be battered by one of the most destructive storms in history.

Study sites 

USGS instruments were placed in the coastal waters offshore from La Parguera and Guánica Bay, Puerto Rico. The instruments where the shelf drops off (yellow square and red triangle) survived Hurricane Maria and collected data important for storm forecasting.

Becoming Maria

The word hurricane derives from the Caribbean Taino people’s Huricán , god of evil. Some of the strongest of these Atlantic tropical cyclones begin where scorching winds from the Sahara clash with moist subtropical air over the island nation of Cape Verde off western Africa. The worst of these atmospheric disturbances create severe thunderstorms with giant cumulonimbus clouds that flatten out against the stratosphere. Propelled by the Earth’s rotation, they begin to circle counterclockwise around each other — a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect.

Weather conditions that summer had already spawned two monster hurricanes: Harvey and Irma. By late September, the extremely warm sea surface — 29º Celsius or hotter in some places — gave up its heat energy by way of evaporation into Maria’s rushing winds. All hurricanes begin as an area of low pressure, which in turn sucks in more wind, accelerating the rise of hot air, or convection. Countervailing winds known as shear can sometimes topple the cone of moist air spiraling upward. But that didn’t happen, so Maria continued to grow in size and intensity.

Meteorologists hoped that Maria would lose force as it moved across the Caribbean, weakened by the wake of cooler water Irma had churned up two weeks earlier. Instead, Maria tracked south, steaming toward the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. Within 15 hours of making landfall, its maximum sustained wind speed doubled, reaching a house-leveling 260 kilometers per hour. That doubling intensified the storm from a milder (still dangerous) Category 1 to a strong Category 5.

NOAA’s computer forecasting models did not anticipate such rapid intensification. Irma had also raged with unforeseen intensity.

After striking Dominica hard, Maria’s eyewall broke down, replaced by an outer band of whipping thunderstorms. This slightly weakened Maria to 250 kilometers per hour before it hit Puerto Rico, while expanding the diameter of the storm’s eyewall — the area of strong winds and heaviest precipitation — to 52 kilometers. That’s close to the width of the island.

It’s still not fully understood why Maria had suddenly gone berserk. Various theories point to the influence of hot towers — convective bursts of heat energy from thunderclouds that punch up into the stratosphere — or deep warm pools, buoyant freshwater eddies spilling out of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers into the Atlantic, where currents carry these pockets of hurricane-fueling heat to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

But even though these smaller-scale events may have a big impact on intensity, they aren’t fully accounted for in weather models, says Hua Leighton, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane research division and the University of Miami’s Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies. Leighton develops forecasting models and investigates rapid intensification of hurricanes.

“We cannot measure everything in the atmosphere,” Leighton says.

Without accurate data on all the factors that drive hurricane intensity, computer models can’t easily predict when the catalyzing events will occur, she says. Nor can models account for everything that happens inside the ocean during a hurricane. They don’t have the data.

Positioning instruments just before a hurricane hits is a major challenge. But NOAA is making progress. It has launched a new generation of hurricane weather buoys in the western North Atlantic and remote control surface sensors called Saildrones that examine the air-sea interface between hurricanes and the ocean ( SN: 6/8/19, p. 24 ).

Underwater, NOAA uses other drones, or gliders, to profile the vast areas regularly traversed by tropical storms. These gliders collected 13,200 temperature and salinity readings in 2020. By contrast, the instruments that the team set in Puerto Rico’s waters in 2017 collected over 250 million data points, including current velocity and direction — a rare and especially valuable glimpse of hurricane-induced ocean dynamics at a single location.

A different view

After the storm passed, Storlazzi was sure the hurricane had destroyed his instruments. They weren’t designed to take that kind of punishment. The devices generally work in much calmer conditions, not the massive swells generated by Maria, which could increase water pressure to a level that would almost certainly crush instrument sensors.

But remarkably, the instruments were battered but not lost. Sherman, Carlo and Touhy retrieved them after Maria passed and put them in crates awaiting the research group’s return.

When Storlazzi and USGS oceanographer Kurt Rosenberger pried open the instrument casings in January 2018, no water gushed out. Good sign. The electronics appeared intact. And the lithium batteries had powered the rapid-fire sampling enterprise for the entire six-month duration. The researchers quickly downloaded a flood of data, backed it up and started transmitting it to Cheriton, who began sending back plots and graphs of what the readings showed.

Floodwaters from the massive rains brought by Maria had pushed a whole lot of polluted sediment to the reefs outside Guánica Bay, spiking PCB concentrations and threatening coral health. As of a few months after the storm, the pollution hadn’t reached the deeper reefs.

Then the researchers realized that their data told another story: what happens underwater during a massive hurricane. They presumed that other researchers had previously captured a profile of the churning ocean depths beneath a hurricane at the edge of a tropical island.

Remarkably, that was not the case.

“Nobody’s even measured this, let alone reported it in any published literature,” Cheriton says. The team began to explore the hurricane data not knowing where it might lead.

“What am I looking at here?” Cheriton kept asking herself as she plotted and analyzed temperature, current velocity and salinity values using computer algorithms. The temperature gradient that showed the ocean’s internal or underwater waves was different than anything she’d seen before.

During the hurricane, the top 20 meters of the Caribbean Sea had consistently remained at or above 26º C, a few degrees warmer than the layers beneath. But the surface waters should have been cooled if, as expected, Maria’s winds had acted like a big spoon, mixing the warm surface with cold water stirred up from the seafloor 50 to 80 meters below. Normally, the cooler surface temperature restricts the heat supply, weakening the hurricane. But the cold water wasn’t reaching the surface.

To try to make sense of what she was seeing, Cheriton imagined herself inside the data, in a protective bubble on the seafloor with the instruments as Maria swept over. Storlazzi worked alongside her analyzing the data, but focused on the sediments circulating around the coral reefs.

Cheriton was listening to “An Awesome Wave” by indie-pop band Alt-J and getting goosebumps while the data swirled before them. Drawing on instincts from her undergraduate astronomy training, she focused her mind’s eye on a constellation of data overhead and told Storlazzi to do the same.

“Look up Curt!” she said.

Up at the crest of the island shelf, where the seafloor drops off, the current velocity data revealed a broad stream of water gushing from the shore at almost 1 meter per second, as if from a fire hose. Several hours before Maria arrived, the wind-driven current had reversed direction and was now moving an order of magnitude faster. The rushing surface water thus became a barrier, trapping the cold water beneath it.

As a result, the surface stayed warm, increasing the force of the hurricane. The cooler layers below then started to pile up vertically into distinct layers, one on top of the other, beneath the gushing waters above.

Cheriton calculated that with the fire hose phenomenon the contribution from coastal waters in this area to Maria’s intensity was, on average, 65 percent greater, compared with what it would have been otherwise.

Fire hose effect 

USGS data from the deep shelf south of Puerto Rico showed that Hurricane Maria’s winds shifted the direction and flow of the surface water with such power that cool waters from deep in the Caribbean Sea were unable to rise to the surface and cool the hurricane. 

• Water moves toward the shore, as wind travels from shore to ocean. Deeper, cool waters (blue and purple) are able to rise with ocean mixing.
• Winds from the shore drive the current out to sea. The cooler water rises but can’t reach the surface, so it is trapped under warmer waters (yellow).
• The wind reverses direction and the surface current relaxes, allowing the cooler deep layers to finally surface.

Oceanographer Travis Miles of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., who was not involved in the research, calls Cheriton and the team’s work a “frontier study” that draws researchers’ attention to near-shore processes. Miles can relate to Cheriton and her team’s accidental hurricane discovery from personal experience: When his water quality–sampling gliders wandered into Hurricane Irene’s path in 2011, they revealed that the ocean off the Jersey Shore had cooled in front of the storm. Irene’s onshore winds had induced seawater mixing across the broad continental shelf and lowered sea surface temperatures.

The Puerto Rico data show that offshore winds over a steep island shelf produced the opposite effect and should help researchers better understand storm-induced mixing of coastal areas, says NOAA senior scientist Hyun-Sook Kim, who was not involved in the research. It can help with identifying deficiencies in the computer models she relies on when providing guidance to storm-tracking meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center in Miami and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii.

And the unexpected findings also could help scientists get a better handle on coral reefs and the role they play in protecting coastlines. “The more we study the ocean, especially close to the coast,” Carlo says, “the more we can improve conditions for the coral and the people living on the island.”

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Classroom Case Study: Modeling the Impacts of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico

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T1 - Classroom Case Study: Modeling the Impacts of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico

AU - James, Sarane

AU - Silfa, Karen

AU - Vogel, Sara

AU - Ascenzi-Moreno, Laura

AU - Hoadley, Christopher

AU - Ma, Jasmine

PY - 2020/10

Y1 - 2020/10

N2 - In this middle school bilingual science unit, students used computational modeling in Scratch to aid their discussions about a topic that hit close to home for students: Hurricane María.Sponsored by the National Science Foundation under NSF grants CNS-1738645 and DRL-1837446. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

AB - In this middle school bilingual science unit, students used computational modeling in Scratch to aid their discussions about a topic that hit close to home for students: Hurricane María.Sponsored by the National Science Foundation under NSF grants CNS-1738645 and DRL-1837446. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

KW - Translanguaging

KW - Computer Science Education

KW - Bilingual Education

KW - Computational Literacies

KW - teacher professional development

UR - https://pila-cs.org/educator-resources

M3 - Other contribution

PB - Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLaCS)

CY - New York

Climate Scientists Use Data from Hurricane Maria to Test New Social Vulnerability Assessment Tool

Newswise — ALBANY, N.Y. (July 31, 2023) — Nearly six years have passed since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. The historic storm, one of the deadliest in U.S. history, significantly damaged more than 80 percent of the island’s electrical power system, leading to massive disruptions of essential services for months.

In a new study, led by González-Cruz of the University at Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center (ASRC), researchers are now using data from Hurricane Maria to assess the critical infrastructure vulnerabilities that still exist in Puerto Rico around extreme weather events, specifically for socially vulnerable populations.

The study was published today in Nature Energy through support from the National Science Foundation’s CRISP grant , a collaborative research project that is using data-driven modeling to evaluate and enhance resiliency in island communities.

“During extreme events, disruptions in service delivery of critical infrastructures disproportionately impact communities based on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics,” said González-Cruz, a Professor of Empire Innovation at ASRC. “Our study presents a new methodology to assess the social vulnerability of extreme weather events, using Hurricane Maria as a case study.”

Reconstructing Hurricane Maria

The study reconstructs the impacts of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico through a combination of geophysical models, engineering models of both the power and water grid, reviews of damage reports, and use of socio-economic information to determine impacts on low-income communities.

To assess the social vulnerability of communities, the researchers developed a novel social vulnerability index for power and water service disruptions. This index builds on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability Index (CDC SVI), incorporating indicators such as socioeconomic status, household composition and the overall accessibility of an area during extreme weather events.

“Our findings show that the impact of power and water service disruptions during extreme weather events varies based on social vulnerability,” said González-Cruz. “In the case of system upgrades, it is crucial to incorporate community social burdens so that upgrade options can provide equity in service delivery.”

After Hurricane Maria, two system upgrade options received popularity among Puerto Rico’s policymakers, according to González-Cruz.

One of the upgrade options, switching from centralized power generation to regional mini-grids, would reduce outages, based on the study’s assessment. However, a large portion of disadvantaged communities would still experience disruption. In contrast, hardening existing transmission lines, as the second option, would improve service delivery and provide uninterrupted service to a higher portion of the island’s vulnerable populations.

“In the particular case of Puerto Rico, we learned that investments in the transmission grid to improve resiliency to extreme weather may provide more continuous services to larger population sectors at risk, than reconfiguring the system into regional grids,” said González-Cruz. “This is valuable information that utilities should consider when making investment decisions for the island’s future.”

Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network

González-Cruz teaches and conducts research in urban energy sustainability, urban weather and climate, urban remote sensing and regional climate modeling and analysis.

Last fall, he joined the Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network  (CCAN), which seeks to connect multidisciplinary scientists with community and government stakeholders in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico to better prepare and respond to climate extremes.

Through CCAN’s support, González-Cruz believes the methodology used in this new study can be expanded to other island communities in the Caribbean, and beyond.

“The next step in our research is to look beyond Puerto Rico, with hopes of creating a roadmap for grid resiliency that can be transferable to other island communities,” González-Cruz said. “The CCAN network will be critical in expanding this work.”

Other study collaborators included Juan Pablo Montoya-Rincón, a graduate student researcher at the City College of New York, Masoud Ghandehari of New York University, Eric Harmsen of the University of Puerto Rico- Mayagüez and Reza Khanbilvardi of the City College of New York.

About the University at Albany:

The University at Albany is one of the most diverse public research institutions in the nation and a national leader in educational equity and social mobility . As a Carnegie-classified R1 institution, UAlbany faculty and students are advancing our understanding of the world fields like artificial intelligence, atmospheric and environmental sciences, business, education, public health, social sciences, criminal justice, humanities, emergency preparedness, engineering, public administration, and social welfare. Our courses are taught by an accomplished roster of faculty experts with student success at the center of everything we do. Through our parallel commitments to academic excellence, scientific discovery, and service to community, UAlbany molds bright, curious and engaged leaders and launches great careers.

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Climate scientists use data from Hurricane Maria to test social vulnerability assessment tool

by Mike Nolan, University at Albany

Nearly six years have passed since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. The historic storm, one of the deadliest in U.S. history, significantly damaged more than 80% of the island's electrical power system, leading to massive disruptions of essential services for months.

In a new study, led by Jorge González-Cruz of the University at Albany's Atmospheric Sciences Research Center (ASRC), researchers are now using data from Hurricane Maria to assess the critical infrastructure vulnerabilities that still exist in Puerto Rico around extreme weather events, specifically for socially vulnerable populations. The study was published in Nature Energy .

"During extreme events , disruptions in service delivery of critical infrastructures disproportionately impact communities based on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics," said González-Cruz, a Professor of Empire Innovation at ASRC. "Our study presents a new methodology to assess the social vulnerability of extreme weather events, using Hurricane Maria as a case study."

Reconstructing Hurricane Maria

The study reconstructs the impacts of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico through a combination of geophysical models, engineering models of both the power and water grid, reviews of damage reports, and use of socio-economic information to determine impacts on low-income communities.

To assess the social vulnerability of communities, the researchers developed a novel social vulnerability index for power and water service disruptions. This index builds on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability Index (CDC SVI), incorporating indicators such as socioeconomic status , household composition and the overall accessibility of an area during extreme weather events.

"Our findings show that the impact of power and water service disruptions during extreme weather events varies based on social vulnerability," said González-Cruz. "In the case of system upgrades, it is crucial to incorporate community social burdens so that upgrade options can provide equity in service delivery."

After Hurricane Maria, two system upgrade options received popularity among Puerto Rico's policymakers, according to González-Cruz.

One of the upgrade options, switching from centralized power generation to regional mini-grids, would reduce outages, based on the study's assessment. However, a large portion of disadvantaged communities would still experience disruption.

In contrast, hardening existing transmission lines , as the second option, would improve service delivery and provide uninterrupted service to a higher portion of the island's vulnerable populations.

"In the particular case of Puerto Rico, we learned that investments in the transmission grid to improve resiliency to extreme weather may provide more continuous services to larger population sectors at risk, than reconfiguring the system into regional grids," González-Cruz said. "This is valuable information that utilities should consider when making investment decisions for the island's future."

Caribbean climate adaptation network

González-Cruz teaches and conducts research in urban energy sustainability, urban weather and climate, urban remote sensing and regional climate modeling and analysis.

Last fall, he joined the Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network (CCAN), which seeks to connect multidisciplinary scientists with community and government stakeholders in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico to better prepare and respond to climate extremes.

Through CCAN's support, González-Cruz believes the methodology used in this new study can be expanded to other island communities in the Caribbean, and beyond.

"The next step in our research is to look beyond Puerto Rico, with hopes of creating a roadmap for grid resiliency that can be transferable to other island communities ," González-Cruz said. "The CCAN network will be critical in expanding this work."

Journal information: Nature Energy

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https://www.nist.gov/disaster-failure-studies/hurricane-maria-program

Disaster & failure studies

Hurricane maria, nist research and investigation.

Español sitio web

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated much of Puerto Rico, damaging buildings that its communities relied on for medical care, safety, communications and more. To better understand how the buildings and infrastructure failed, and how we can prevent such failures in the future, in 2018 NIST launched a multi-year effort to study how critical buildings performed during the storm, as well as how emergency communications systems worked.

The goal of this effort is to make recommendations to improve building codes, standards and practices to make communities across the U.S. more resilient to hurricanes and other disasters. NIST has a long history of studying disasters so that we can learn from them and improve our buildings or procedures. For example, after the World Trade Center disaster,  NIST’s recommendations led to changes  in how we build buildings and respond to emergencies. Additionally, thanks to NIST’s work studying the effects of tornadoes, building codes and communications practices  have been changed  to keep people safer.

In Puerto Rico, NIST seeks to understand Hurricane Maria’s wind environment and the conditions that led to injuries and deaths; how critical buildings and designated safe areas within them performed—including their dependence on electricity, water, transportation and other infrastructure; how emergency communications systems performed and the public’s response to such communications; and the impacts to, and recovery of, selected businesses, hospitals and schools, as well as the critical social functions they provide.

The NIST team is involving local and regional emergency management officials; building departments, transportation and other public utilities; education and healthcare officials and staff; and local, regional, and Commonwealth elected officials and civil servants as well as individuals. NIST also is coordinating its work with other federal agencies, private sector organizations, and academic institutions. Several contractors are assisting the NIST team’s engineers, sociologists, economists, meteorologists, and other researchers. Because NIST is not a regulatory agency, it does not issue new codes or standards. However, NIST will work with all relevant public and private citizens to encourage voluntary implementation of the recommendations in its final report.

Information Collection in Progress NIST contractors are now collecting information for multiple Hurricane Maria related projects. If you or your organization (e.g., business, school, hospital) have been contacted, please consider participating. Your response will contribute to recommended improvements in building codes, standards, and practices to make communities in Puerto Rico and across the United States more resilient to hurricanes and other disasters. See the Hurricane Maria Projects page for project-specific information. If you have questions about this collection of information, please contact Dr. Maria Dillard, NIST: Maria.Dillard [at] NIST.gov (Maria[dot]Dillard[at]NIST[dot]gov) . or via telephone 202-281-0908.

Media Contact

• Jennifer Huergo [email protected] (301) 975-6343
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