Horrifying. It sounds like we need to step up and be extra creative with disaster relief:
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million American citizens remain almost entirely without electrical power — but it’s not because their power plants are blown. The problem is that roughly 80 percent of transmission lines, which take power from the plants to distribution centers, are down. Nearly all the local power lines that run to residences and businesses have likely also been destroyed.
The damage is so severe that simply repairing the electrical grid may not be an option. “We really should think in terms of rebuilding at this point,” says Ken Buell, director of Emergency Response and Recovery with the US Department of Energy...
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The airport is running on a generator and is open for daytime operations at the moment, but the radar systems are still down, Buell says. Planes cannot leave the mainland until they have a guaranteed spot on the tarmac at the San Juan Airport, which at one point created an 11-hour delay to land and unload supplies. “So there’s this huge backlog of getting stuff onto the island that you wouldn’t see typically with a storm that’s on the mainland.”