- "When we can get outside, we will find our island destroyed," Abner Gómez of the emergency management agency said at a news conference Wednesday. "The information we received is not encouraging. It's a system that has destroyed everything it has had in its wake."
This is the island that said "despite our economic problems, we found 15 million for our disaster fund" before Irma went by. I don't even know if 15 million is enough to get the port or airport back to capacity if it's damaged.
Someone managed to put together some before-and-after pictures -- "Antes y después del huracán María." Looks like much of San Juan got through with just broken windows and garbage everywhere. The hotels will probably be ready for tourists again before half the population potable water or electricity again. http://www.primerahora.com/fotogalerias/noticias/puerto-rico/antesydespuesdelhuracanmaria-1246837/foto-1/ La Perla got trashed though. La Perla has been a ghetto for hundreds of years - its built outside Old San Juan's fortress walls, right on the edge of the water, by freed slaves and other homeless riff-raff who weren't allowed to stay in the city at night at the time. http://www.primerahora.com/fotogalerias/noticias/puerto-rico/deshecholaperla-1246730/foto-1/ Most houses in Puerto Rico (that I saw, anyway) are concrete or cinderblock construction, and if they weren't in disrepair should have made it through the storm without structural damage. However it also looked like the farther from a touristy beach, the more houses were cinderblock shells with plywood and corrugated tin keeping the weather out. PR didn't get hit as badly as St Martin, Barbuda, or Dominica. St Martin is French and Dutch -- they will get a lot of the aid they need to recover from Europe. Barbuda and Dominica are worse off -- they're on their own. Puerto Rico has 40X the people as the biggest of those three, if it had any sane governmental status it would be able to take a punch and stand back up. But no. And they're in their 12th consecutive year of economic depression. They could have restructured their debt and started recovery a decade ago if they were either sovereign or a state. It pisses me off. If Puerto Rico turns into a humanitarian crisis with a million homeless living in mud, it's because they've been our pigeon-toed step-child since we grabbed the island from Spain.
Dominica is for all intents and purposes, dead Puerto Rico is looking at $75 Billion, minimal IMO, to get back to a functional society. The most wonderful thing to come out of these storms is the very low fatality count.