Last week, Harvard released a study that estimated the death toll from Hurricane Maria to be more than 4,600—well above the Puerto Rican government’s count of 64. Meanwhile, researchers from Johns Hopkins University believe it to be even higher. This serves as a grave reminder that nearly nine months after Maria, the island continues to suffer from the devastation of the deadly storm. But the worst may not be over. As Puerto Rico continues its recovery efforts, it is simultaneously gearing up for the 2018 hurricane season, which began on June 1.
Puerto Ricans are not convinced that the island can withstand another storm, and neither are local officials. In fact, they are adamant that the electrical grid is not ready for hurricane season and won’t be ready for quite some time. According to reporting from NBC News, it may take until December or longer before things are running effectively.
Hector Pesquera, Puerto Rico's commissioner of safety and public protection, told NBC News bluntly that the island's electrical grid can't withstand another hurricane.
"I'll tell you right now, ‘No,’" he said. "That is the weakest link right now ... we can't fix it in six months."
And yet, despite local officials claiming that the island isn’t ready for hurricane season, FEMA maintains that they, as an agency, are, with an increase in supply warehouses on the island to hold food and water and more than 3,000 workers who will be on the island. This provides for a pretty frightening study in contrasts. The federal government completely botched its response to Maria with unnecessary delays, the hiring of unqualified contractors, and delays in funding for recovery efforts.
And let’s not forget that the mainstream media has long since moved on, choosing to cover almost anything and everything instead. When the Harvard study about the island’s post-Hurricane Maria death toll was released, cable news networks decided to spend hours of programming dedicated to the cancellation of Roseanne instead of covering the deaths of the island’s residents. As the Columbia Journalism Review writes, this demonstrates a serious lack of attention toward and an inability to clearly cover issues of systemic injustice.
The watchdog group Media Matters for America calculated that cable news networks covered Roseanne Barr’s tweet and her show’s cancellation 16 times as much as the deaths of U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico.
The frenzied coverage of Barr’s comments and the ease with which media outlets labeled them “racist,” while reports on Puerto Rico’s catastrophe receive far less attention, reflect a systemic problem. We’re comfortable calling individual actions or comments racist, but struggle to paint systemic issues—the criminal justice system or the lack of attention to Puerto Rico, for example—with the same clear strokes.
In this way, America is much more concerned with giving racists attention than it is with helping the actual victims of racism. Even on the political left, there’s a constant struggle with how to right the injustices of racism beyond an individual or interpersonal level. Surely, Roseanne facing the consequences of her racism is a good and important thing, especially in an era where political candidates and the country’s leader are openly campaigning on it and have pulled us into an ugly discourse that takes us back to where our race relations were the 1950s. But we need to focus on more. What happened and continues to happen in Puerto Rico is also about race and how people are victimized by white supremacy—both in terms of who has been impacted by the storm and how the largely white, male media is choosing to ignore covering the conditions on the island.
Vann Newkirk, a Daily Kos alum who now writes for The Atlantic, reminds us that there are interlocking systems of oppression at work in Puerto Rico which will only get worse if they are not addressed. In a recent story about the scope of the disaster, he notes:
Beyond raw death counts, the woes inflicted—and uncovered—by Maria are comparable to those revealed after Katrina. As I reported in October, many of the lasting effects of flooding, contamination, and ill health in Puerto Rico compounded along lines of race and class, just as they did after Katrina hit New Orleans. Maria has also shined a spotlight on the federal government’s relationship with its largest territory, further exacerbating one of the most consequential domestic migrations since the Dust Bowl and exposing the future difficulties of austerity on a debt-riddled island.
Right now, there’s simply no time to waste. According to San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, it won’t take much for the island to fall into chaos this hurricane season. She told NBC News that the island’s medical facilities aren’t prepared for another storm.
She said it wouldn't take a Category 5 storm to devastate the island; a Category 1 would cripple the infrastructure.
"This is a tale of two disasters," she says. "One made by nature and the other that was government-made."
Sadly, we cannot go back in time and change how the disaster in Puerto Rico was handled. But we can do better now for those who still live there. That starts with government transparency about the death toll and developing comprehensive plans to aid the most vulnerable populations in the event of another hurricane. It includes fixing the electrical grid and the island’s crumbling infrastructure, well beyond the condition it was in before Hurricane Maria. It also means forgiving the island’s crushing debt and helping people find ways to make a decent living on the island.
Media plays a significant role in this. Instead of reporting ad nauseam on Russian collusion, Trump’s incomprehensible tweets, and Melania’s whereabouts, maybe we could spend some significant time and attention on this critical issue impacting millions of people. In fact, let’s treat this disaster like it happened in Beverly Hills or some other wealthy, white community instead of Puerto Rico. It’s awful to say, but we know the response would vastly different if it happened to people of means who aren’t racial minorities.
It’s been almost a year and Puerto Rico still doesn’t have the resources it needs. This is not only a man-made disaster, but it’s going to be the textbook case of how government greed, racism, incompetence, and cruelty looked under the tenure of Donald Trump. And Puerto Ricans will pay the ultimate price for the government, media, and American populace continuing to look the other way.