Hard to believe it, but yes, tomorrow marks six months since the eye of the horrific category 4 Hurricane Maria began its trajectory across the entire island of Puerto Rico on September 20th, 2017. It left behind what is still today, an ongoing recovery, and by far the longest recovery in US history from natural disaster.
The recovery has been plagued with many challenges like the fact that Puerto Rico is an island making the process of transporting the necessary equipment and materials slow and extensive. Unfortunately, to that you added the fiscal economic disaster, aging infrastructure, politicians and emergency personnel with little to no experience in emergency response, the same who sorted to play the media “hey look at me” wanting to get exposure as appose to spending the time on making real progress, tons of bureaucracy from local to federal barriers and the island was left nothing short from an embarrassment for FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers and many local agencies and mayors in island. Sadly, many of those that represent these same agencies have taken this colossal challenge with the best of intentions.
To no surprise, a quick glance at the FEMA.gov’s official report of the islands recovery progress is stuck at the 4 months’ mark as you can see depicted below:
FEMA Puerto Rico Recovery Progress
Therefore, it is not as easy to simply point the figure to one direction, but to rather look at what those challenges are and how to expedite the resolution so that the recovery could be further expedited. The reality is that not all the problems caused by Hurricane Maria will be rectified, but this historic event expose much of the political and economic issues that shows disadvantage under current colonial rules. For many Puerto Ricans both in the island and in the Mainland, the most important question is “What’s next?”.
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