Hurricane Maria/Puerto Rico

With six dead, millions of residents facing months without electricity, and far-flung relatives desperately trying to contact their loved ones, Puerto Rico is only just beginning to grapple with the fallout from Hurricane Maria, the strongest storm the island has faced in nearly a century. Looming over those recovery efforts is a vital question: Who will foot the bill for the estimated $10 billion in damages?

Early on Wednesday, September 20, Hurricane Maria — a powerful Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds — made direct landfall on Puerto Rico, bisecting the entire island and drenching it with feet of rain. What’s happened since has been truly catastrophic for Puerto Rico.

There’s still little power on the island. In many places, there’s still no water to drink or bathe in or to flush toilets. There’s limited food and cell service, and dozens of remote villages have been completely cut off from everything for weeks. Hurricane Maria trashed Puerto Rico, demolishing its already weak electrical, communications, and transportation infrastructure. The storm quickly gave way to a humanitarian crisis, with many of Puerto Rico’s residents struggling to access food, water, and fuel to run generators and cars. Help has been slow to arrive. And with each passing day, we’re learning more about the frightening conditions on the ground, from the sick being turned away from barely functioning hospitals to mothers desperate for water for their babies.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico A month after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, many of the 3.4 million citizens on the island are desperate for aid as they struggle daily to find basic necessities like food, drinking water, medicine and consistent forms of communication.

The island’s capital, San Juan, has fared better than the other 77 municipalities. But just outside the metropolitan areas, impoverished communities in towns like Canóvanas and Loíza are still impatiently waiting for FEMA or any government aid to arrive four weeks after the storm.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto, 54, says she has visited towns like Loíza and Comerío outside of her municipality and witnessed bleak scenes, and has called the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to the hurricane inefficient and bureaucratic. She’s also criticized President Donald Trump’s leadership during the current crisis in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico Damages

Puerto Rico battled dangerous floods on Friday after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, as rescuers raced against time to reach residents trapped in their homes and the death toll climbed to 33.

Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello called Maria the most devastating storm in a century after it destroyed the US territory’s electricity and telecommunications infrastructure

The Broken Dam

Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello called Maria the most devastating storm in a century after it destroyed the US territory’s electricity and telecommunications infrastructure.

http://nypost.com/2017/09/25/puerto-rico-dam-on-brink-of-collapse/

Working Against Time

We are the Red Bank GIS class and we have been mapping different areas where the hurricanes have hit such as Puerto Rico, Texas,and the Virgin Islands . The class has been mapping Puerto Rico crisis 3 days in advance before anyone knew and before the Hurricane hit. when we were mapping Puerto Rico the streets and dirt roads was horrible so the class had to fix up the roads. we spent a lot of time fixing than actually mapping.

Red Bank High School was "on the scene" first, but a college group helping with a 3 hour marathon was posted in New York Times newspaper.

A Mapathon to Pinpoint Areas Hardest Hit in Puerto Rico

By ALICE YIN OCT. 2, 2017

The group had assembled on Friday at Columbia University’s Butler Library, for a three-hour mapathon, a tech-based response to the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Maria ripped out entire buildings, roads and power sources, resulting in logistical chaos on the ground.

Maps can show a hidden weakness during natural disasters. In remote areas, where forces often wreak the greatest devastation, entire villages may have never made it onto a map. That could be because private companies, which hold the rights to their maps, have less incentive to include those areas, or because the government does not have the resources for frequent updates to existing maps. Even when a region is mapped, changes in neighborhoods could alter the landscape drastically in less than a year

Puerto Rico With No Power

Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico with winds of 155 miles an hour, leaving the United States commonwealth on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. The storm left 80 percent of crop value destroyed, 60 percent of the island without water and almost the entire island without power, as seen in the nighttime satellite image below.

The Devastation Of The Toads

Though Hurricane Maria had dropped from a Category 5 to a Category 4 storm by the time it reached Puerto Rico, it was more than powerful enough to rip apart roads and strip trees as it cut a path across the island.

Puerto Rico Hospital

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Two weeks after Hurricane Maria ravaged this island, doctors and nurses are still in nonstop triage, working furiously to save lives and ease pain while struggling to contend with power outages, hospital evacuations, dwindling supplies and even crime outside their doors. Hurricane Maria didn't just create new problems for Puerto Rico's health care system; it exacerbated old ones, as doctors were already stretched thin by the island's economic crisis, especially in less populated areas.

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