Today, Explained - It's Been Six Months

Episode Date: March 20, 2018

Today is the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Maria, one of the worst natural disasters in American history. But Puerto Rico remains without fully-restored power or an exact idea of how many people died because of the storm. Latino USA’s Julio Ricardo Varela looks at the recovery and explains the real reason it’s taking so long. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello. Are you looking to move to the cloud? Sounds nice, right? Google wants to help. Check out the Google Cloud Platform Weekly Podcast, where Google developer advocates answer questions, get in the weeds, and talk to experts, customers, and partners about GCP. That's the Google Cloud Platform. Learn more and subscribe to the podcast at g.co slash Gp podcast. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. Today is the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Maria,

the Category 4 storm that essentially devastated Puerto Rico, put it back into the 19th century. The strongest storm this island has faced in nearly a century. The island's already fragile infrastructure decimated. The Puerto Rico and the San Juan that we knew yesterday is no longer there. Imagine a place where everything just shuts down. This is Julio Ricardo Varela. He works with Latino USA. I'm also Puerto Rican boricua, born on the island, grew up there, moved to a suburb of Puerto Rico called the Bronx. Been covering Puerto Rico since I was a young journalist in my 20s.

When Maria hit six months ago, we heard things like this. Officials say help is on the way, but a full recovery could take half a year. So Julio, six months later, how are things now? There's still, I would say about 100, 200,000 people that don't have power and they haven't had power for six months. Yeah. Things are kind of coming back to normal. But in the, you know, in the mountains, in the countryside, there's a town that I grew up near

called Yabucoa. They have been without power and they've been like Facebook-living, you know, this march for light and for power. As recently as

the last couple weeks, there have been rolling blackouts. So this whole notion that like things are back is just such a crock. It is the most defining moment in the history of modern Puerto Rico. You can never talk about Puerto Rico ever again without talking about whether it was pre-Maria or post-Maria. Shame! Shame on the federal government for failing fellow citizens in Puerto Rico. There's a rally in D.C. today.

Protesters are demanding a comprehensive aid package of something like $95 billion for the island. It definitely hasn't had the urgency of, say, for example, what happened in Houston with Harvey or what happened in Florida with Irma. Okay. There's this fear that we're going to be ignored again. And what you're seeing in DC today is these groups saying no. Although, sadly, I don't think there's going to be a lot of like political movement on it at all. You mentioned that over 100,000 people still don't have power six months after Maria. Places continue to lose power due to blackouts, you were saying. it at all. You mentioned that over 100,000 people still don't have power six months after Maria.

Places continue to lose power due to blackouts, you were saying. So what's the story with the power, Julio? What's taken so long? I think it's really important when you start talking about Puerto Rico and the power, it's so easy to be like, Trump bad, and that's why Puerto Rico's in trouble. It's not only that, like every Puerto Rican who has followed this on the island has always known that the power issue has been incredibly problematic. Puerto Rico is like 100 miles wide by 35 miles north-south. Okay. There's this main transmission line that goes from south to north that basically powers the entire island. That got destroyed.

It's not just the federal government messed up with Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans messed up. And it sounds like a lot of the blame sits with the big energy utility in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has its own problems of taking the utility company known as PREPA, which is the Puerto Rican Energy and Power Authority, formed in 1941. It basically powered Puerto Rico into modernization. And how did PREPA mess up? What happened when you're dealing with a public-private corporation is that because a lot of the governing board is politically appointed, you get inefficiency, and you have to think about

it over the course of decades. PREPA is probably the most hated agency in Puerto Rico. And there's been these, like, what, proposals to make it sort of a public-private partnership with American companies? Is that what's happening right now? Well, the governor of Puerto Rico wants to privatize it in the next 18 months. Completely. Puerto Ricans don't agree on a lot of things, but most of us agree that PREPA just is a mess. What does that mean for people who are so dependent on power right now just to stay alive? Like people who need medical services or generators or stuff like that?

When all the power goes out, everyone who's on a medical machine or in hospitals, everything just goes away. Dialysis machines, you know, insulin, like you have no refrigeration. Yeah. The first time I talked to my cousin, about a week and a half after the hurricane, he already told me that he had went to a funeral where one of his friends died because his dialysis machine, like, just stopped. Like, he had no treatment. You know, the stories about people dying with no power didn't come from reporters.

It came from Puerto Ricans saying, this happened to my neighbor. Who do I tell? The lack of power literally killed people. Literally killed people. Literally killed people. And of course, the number of people who have died has been a highly contested figure. I think the official count is at 64. Correct. But the Center for Investigative Journalism and other media outlets say it might be higher than a thousand. What's the latest update there? Yes, it's over a thousand. So basically the month of October and September

of 2017 were the highest months of recorded deaths in the last three years in Puerto Rico. Okay. 1,194 excess deaths when you take September 2017 and October 2017 and compare it to the previous months. Okay. There's a study that's going to come out, I believe in May, out of the School of Public Health at George Washington University in DC that's going to look into the death count again and recategorize what are, quote unquote, hurricane related deaths and what are deaths during that time that were natural causes. So what kind of things are you talking about?

What's an example of something that the government isn't counting as a hurricane related death? This is the case of Paulita Cidron Rodriguez. Paulita lived in Yalco, and she was 69 years old. She had several physical and mental health conditions. She left her house on October 2nd. She wanted to

cross a river, and there was no bridge because the river had flooded. The bridge had fallen in her neighborhood, and so she followed a path that her neighbors told her about, and then she never returned. That's when one of the neighbors reported her missing to the police, and then they found her body dead on the path. The son, he just was unable to control.

He was crying, and he was actually grateful that she wasn't swept by the river. Her death was not added to the official count. There's hundreds, maybe even over a thousand stories like these that have yet to be told. Julio, there's so much focus on the death count, and it feels sort of callous at times to hear people arguing about it. Why is it so important to get it right, to get the number of people who died because of Maria right? It's important because it became political.

So I don't know if you remember when President Trump actually visited Puerto Rico, and I'll never forget it. Every death is a horror. But if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died. You see President Trump bragging, bragging about how low the death count was. And what is your death count as of this moment? 17?

16 certified. 16 people certified. 16 people versus in the thousands. Okay, so that's the Puerto Rican governor telling the president that the death count is at 16. Everyone knew that was a political mistake by the governor of Puerto Rico. He wasn't being 100% honest. It sounds like you put a fair amount of blame on Puerto Rico's governor, Ricardo Rosselló. But there's this march in Washington today.

People are obviously pretty mad at the president about how he's conducted himself regarding Puerto Rico. Is there a person to blame or is it sort of just the bigger crisis in Puerto Rico that's more at fault here? The government of Puerto Rico had issues for sure, but it sure as hell didn't help that you had an administration that really came across as not being interested. A week before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the National Hurricane Center did a map, right? They always do a map of what the storm is going to look like, the track, across five days. And the storm was covering all of Puerto Rico. Like, you couldn't even see Puerto Rico on the map.

This was a week before, and you're going to tell me that the federal government of the United States didn't know that this was coming? It's hard to make sense of the situation in Puerto Rico, but Julio says it becomes easier once you understand the debt crisis. That's just ahead on Today Explained. Moving can be tricky, especially when you're looking to relocate to the cloud. If you need some help, check out the Google Cloud Platform Weekly Podcast, where Google developer advocates Melanie Warwick and Mark Mandel answer any and all questions you might have about working in the cloud, from security to machine learning and more.

Hear from technologists all around Google about trends and the cool things happening with all their technology. Learn more and subscribe to the podcast at g.co slash GCP podcast. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, and I'm speaking with Julio Ricardo Varela about Puerto Rico six months after Hurricane Maria. If you want to understand why Hurricane Maria was so devastating to Puerto Rico, you need to step back a couple of decades and start looking at the origins of the island's

debt crisis. As Puerto Rico was evolving out of the 40s and the 50s, there was this push to modernize it, to industrialize it, to bring in U.S.-based companies and multinational companies. And so these tax incentives gave companies the incentive to set up shop in Puerto Rico. So it was a really good time to be a business, to be a worker, to be a professional in Puerto Rico. And then you get to 1996. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, they did the welfare reform deal. And one of the things that was made out of that compromise is that the tax incentives, which was Section 936 for all these companies in Puerto Rico, that they would be phased out in 10 years. What revenues do you have? Who are you going to tax when the American corporations that are in Puerto Rico, precisely of 936, go to foreign shorts? Where do you get the revenue from?

It is not the corporations that I'm here to defend, but the 300,000 jobs that are created. Let's look at the laws that govern Puerto Rico. It has expired. But we don't want to have a debate about that. So companies start leaving in droves because the tax breaks are phasing out. 2006, the tax breaks are done. They're officially gone. And then two years later, global recession.

And all of a sudden, Puerto Rico had no money. How does it look different now than it did 30, 40 years ago before these businesses left? When I was growing up, there was a thriving middle class. I mean, I grew up in Puerto Rico in the 70s. My dad and our family, we would literally go through the middle of the island all the way to the southeast. And I'll just remember seeing pharmaceutical companies going down the highway amongst the mountains. You know, like Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly. You just see industry everywhere. And I think that has changed a lot now.

People like me, we started leaving. There were better job opportunities. The government of Puerto Rico was like, oh, we got to maintain these services. So let's borrow more. And they just kept borrowing and borrowing and borrowing. And who were they borrowing from? The United States? Government bonds. They're borrowing and borrowing and borrowing.

The recession hits. Then there's no revenue because there's no jobs because companies are leaving. Meanwhile, the population is getting older, and then the professional class is leaving the island. The Promesa Bill comes along, and there's a fiscal control board that gets formed,

and it basically tells the island how you need to spend your money. But the thing is, the island doesn't have any money. They declare bankruptcy, and then boom, Hurricane Maria hits. It literally was the final straw that broke the camel's back. But the camel's back was already kind of broken. How would this have gone down differently if Puerto Rico was a state? They would have had more powers to protect themselves. Puerto Ricans that live on the island cannot vote for federal elected officials.

They can't vote for congressman or senator or president. If they had representation, there's a political skin in the game. Like the United States does not care about Puerto Rico. Congress does not care about Puerto Rico. It's the last colony for the United States. But the problem with Puerto Rico, we don't know what we want. By being inherently colonial for close to 120 years, we've become a colonized people. Is Maria like a way to reassess the relationship? Yes. You see like municipalities and towns in Puerto Rico saying, you know what? We don't need PREPA.

We don't need the governor of Puerto Rico. We don't need the federal government. We're going to do it ourselves. And I think it's starting to lead to very interesting conversations of what the relationship is between Puerto Rico and the United States. One town in Puerto Rico literally is living off the grid. They have their own solar panels. They do not need the Puerto Rican electric and power authority.

They powered up a town square. What happened with Maria was a shock to the system. People are leaving the island. But, you know, I've talked to enough people who are like, I'm going to go back. You know, I love this place. This is my home. And we don't talk to enough people like that. Because in the end, the people that are going to stay are going to be the ones that say,

this is what I want my politics to be. This is what I want my society to be. And this is why I love Puerto Rico. This protest today in D.C., the people that organized it, these are young, bilingual, bicultural Puerto Ricans who are like, this matters to me. And they don't have the shackles of previous politics. They just know that what we've done in the past

as a colony isn't working. I'm still very hopeful about the future of my homeland. Julio Ricardo Varela hosts a podcast called In The Thick. This is Today Explained. Follow Today Explained on Twitter at today underscore explained. Para todos los tuiteros que están escuchando este podcast,

sigue a Today Explained en Twitter. Today guión bajito explained. Gracias. Before we go, a little reminder that Google wants to help you relocate to the cloud. Check out the Google Cloud Platform Weekly Podcast. It's a good place to hear Google developer advocates answer questions, get in the weeds, and talk to experts, customers, and partners about the cloud. Learn more and subscribe to the podcast at g.co slash gcp podcast.