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This paper discusses the effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico's electric grid. Arguably, the most significant effect of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico was the electric power outage that initially affected the entire island and lasted more than ten months. Although the damage to the conventional electric power generation infrastructure was relatively minor, both the transmission and distribution portions of the grid suffered much worse damage than that observed during other hurricanes that affected the U.S. in the past decade. This extensive damage added to logistical limitations and the island orography were important factors that contributed to an extremely slow restoration process leading to a very low resilience for the island's power grid. This paper describes all these aspects in detail and supports the explanation of the hurricane effects with photographic evidence collected during a damage assessment conducted in the early December 2017 when about half of the electricity customers were still without service. This paper concludes by exploring some lessons from these observations including potential options to increase resilience, such as the use of microgrids.

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Given the possibilities of synthetic biology, weapons of mass destruction and global climate change, humans may achieve the capacity globally to alter life. This crisis calls for an ethics that furnishes effective motives to take global action necessary for survival. We propose a research program for understanding why ethical principles change across time and culture. We also propose provisional motives and methods for reaching global consensus on engineering field ethics. Current interdisciplinary research in ethics, psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary theory grounds these proposals. Experimental ethics, the application of scientific principles to ethical studies, provides a model for developing policies to advance solutions. A growing literature proposes evolutionary explanations for moral development. Connecting these approaches necessitates an experimental or scientific ethics that deliberately examines theories of morality for reliability. To illustrate how such an approach works, we cover three areas. The first section analyzes cross-cultural ethical systems in light of evolutionary theory. While such research is in its early stages, its assumptions entail consequences for engineering education. The second section discusses Howard University and University of Puerto Rico/Mayagüez (UPRM) courses that bring ethicists together with scientists and engineers to unite ethical theory and practice. We include a syllabus for engineering and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) ethics courses and a checklist model for translating educational theory and practice into community action. The model is based on aviation, medicine and engineering practice. The third and concluding section illustrates Howard University and UPRM efforts to translate engineering educational theory into community action. Multidisciplinary teams of engineering students and instructors take their expertise from the classroom to global communities to examine further the ethicality of prospective technologies and the decision-making processes that lead to them.

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