What is happening in Puerto Rico?
Since the storm made landfall on September 20, Hurricane Maria has wreaked havoc on the island, causing a level of widespread destruction and disorganization paralleled by few storms in American history. Almost two weeks after the storm abated, most of the island’s residents still lack access to electricity and clean water.
From a meteorological standpoint, Maria was nearly a worst-case scenario for the territory: The center of a huge, nearly Category 5 hurricane made a direct hit on Puerto Rico, lashing the island with wind and rain for longer than 30 hours. “It was as if a 50- to 60-mile-wide tornado raged across Puerto Rico.
Catastrophic events are rarer than disasters, and they tend to wipe out infrastructure over a large swath of land. “Most, if not all, of the built environment is destroyed” in a catastrophe, Wachtendorf told me.
“It’s very difficult to navigate the impact zone—to know which roads are open, and to know what to detour around. It’s extremely difficult to pre-position supplies, because if you have any supplies pre-positioned they might have been destroyed. You have [local] officials that are unable to take their usual roles on,” she said.
This renders Maria a different class of disaster than Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, both of which left much of the nearby infrastructure standing. In both storms, supplies that were positioned inland or in Atlanta were still available after the storms had passed.
But were the bad effects of Hurricane Maria made worse by a slow federal response? Democrats and other critics have implicated President Donald Trump’s dawdling response to the hurricane—he did not hold a Situation Room meeting on the disaster until six days after landfall—in the low quality of the relief effort. The president’s tendency to take criticisms of the effort personally has not seemed to help either.
Are these criticisms fair? And how should we even understand the Puerto Rico disaster? To help get a handle on the storm, I put together a timeline of the major events in Puerto Rico before and after Hurricane Maria made landfall. It follows below, and I’ll keep it updated in the days to come.