If you needed a seismic metaphor for the state of America’s empire, Puerto Rico is providing one.
its legally mandated $15-an-hour minimum wage for relief work and inexplicably blocking any spending on the electrical grid., are never really natural. They’re formed in the friction between geologic forces, human frailty, and the environments we build . Puerto Rico, a centuries-old product of slavery and colonialism, has spent the past 121 years as a colony of the United States. In recent years, the territory has effectively been the.
Puerto Rico’s unrepresented population was never given any say. The seven-member Financial Oversight and Management Board created by President Barack Obama implemented a strict austerity regime. Corrupt local officials siphoned what was left., higher than all but six of the 3,142 counties tracked in the states by the U.S. Census Bureau. This in turn sparked a death spiral as people fled the islands. From 2009 to 2017, Puerto Rico’s population fell by 12 percent.
The storms exposed something Puerto Rican engineers had known for years: The island’s electrical infrastructure is old, inadequate, and obscenely set up. Seventy percent of the main island’s electricity generation is in the south, in decrepit facilities such as Costa Sur, an oil-and-gas behemoth built from 1962 to 1973. Seventy percent of the energy is, on the other hand, in the north, primarily in the San Juan metro area.
When I was in Puerto Rico just after Maria, everyone involved in the response agreed: The priorities were to get the electrical grid working as quickly as possible but also rebuild it in a way that would last. Mike Byrne, the head coordinator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in that disaster, told me: “We should take a breath and do it the right way when we build it back, you know? … Looking at this ’50s and ’60s technology, we’ve made some advances.
Disasters are formed in the friction between geologic forces, human frailty, and the environments we build (or
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