Research by the Harvard School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center finds the death toll in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria was 4,645, more than double the death toll from Hurricane Katrina. But Donald Trump prefers the “official” number of 16.
Off the east coast of Puerto Rico, there are two island municipalities. One, Isla de Vieques, has an area of about 134 square miles and a population of 8,825. The other island is Isla Culebra, which has an area of 11 square miles and a population of just under 1,800. Both islands were hit badly by Hurricane Maria, and now both have been given substantial aid by Tesla.
Puerto Rico has been devastated.
Yesterday, I spent about an hour watching a video that was taken from the dashboard of a car driving through the Puerto Rican countryside. My friend Joseph Mangum had driven for miles through the mountains, over roads with piles of wreckage on the sides that seemed endless. Beyond the wreckage was a countryside populated by trees that had been stripped bare.
Florida is known for hurricanes1. As a teenage kid growing up in Miami, we never knew anything about the glory of snow days up North, but we did have Hurricane Days. They usually came in the worst month of Florida’s weather — September. That month, after all, came at the end of a long and hot Florida summer known to be famously muggy and wet. Late August and September are also the rainiest periods in the Liquid Sunshine State, and even worse, school started back before Labor Day.
Puerto Rico’s never-ending power restoration struggle gets another setback as the now-notorious Whitefish Energy company halts work on its contract.
Puerto Rico stands at a very interesting juncture. Does it rebuild its power infrastructure according to traditional, centralized models, where in this case most of the power was generated in the south of the island and most of the demand came from the north, or does it embrace a wholly new model?
Aid and recovery efforts continue for Puerto Rico. Disheartening news is that more than 50% of Puerto Rico is without clean water in mid-October. Puerto Rico is storm battered from Hurricane Maria, a more extensive human crisis than even Hurricane Katrina created. Stepping in to hasten recovery is a Bay Area–based nonprofit in collaboration with other helping arms.
Empowered by Light, Sunrun, and Givepower are responding to the need by focusing on compassionate, long-term response and environmentally friendly solutions.
There’s a lot more to replacing a grid than just solar and storage. Tesla can certainly help Puerto Rico rebuild, but it will be one of many participants in that process. It could easily make a lot of individual residences and office buildings more resilient with rooftop solar and PowerWalls. It could easily double or triple the amount of solar generation Puerto Rico has today. It could easily set up grid storage that would smooth the use of more renewables.
I should start this off with a disclosure. I know Joseph Mangum personally. However, I am not profiting in any way from this message, aside from the feeling I get from being able to spread it here. I can say I believe that Joseph’s message is true, precisely as he presents it.
Puerto Rico has been ravaged and is facing significant loss of human life and harm to human life, among other things. Lack of drinking water, dehydration, food scarcity, and so many other problems are facing the Americans living there. The electric power grid in Puerto Rico is gone.
In a humanitarian effort to help the devastated and still threatened population, one of the companies stepping in to help is Tesla.
