Hurricanes and the Environmental Justice Island: Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico

Abstract

This article presents an overview of our research team’s disaster response to the massive destruction of Hurricanes, Irma and Maria, in September 2017, in light of the 120-year colonial legacy and long-term, widespread environmental contamination in Puerto Rico. Both local and federal governmental responses have been extremely inadequate, especially in light of the long-standing issues of environmental contamination throughout the island. Community organizations in Puerto Rico have been fighting for environmental justice for decades, often succeeding, and always confronting government unwillingness to address environmental protection. Hurricanes Irma and Maria afforded attention to Puerto Rico through international news coverage and awareness of its colonial status, rundown infrastructures (especially the electric grid), indebtedness, and environmental hazards. Since the hurricanes, the research teams of the Puerto Rico Test Site to Explore Contamination Threats (PROTECT), the Center for Research on Early Childhood Exposure and Development (CRECE), and Zika in Infants and Pregnancy (ZIP) have worked tirelessly to address the needs of our research participants, partnering clinics, as well as the local team to ensure safety and wellness. We have been able to continue our environmental public health work with pregnant women and children. In response to the historical problems and current crisis, we offer a “visionary rebuilding” approach for remediation of the hurricanes’ effects, and for a deeper solution to the environmental and other social injustices Puerto Rico has long faced.

Impact of Hurricane Maria on Drinking Water Quality in Puerto Rico

“…1,2 HM directly killed 64 people in PR with excess deaths estimated from 990 1 to 4645, 3 destroyed over 90% of the electrical systems and 80% of the agricultural sectors, and left large areas without communication, water, and health care services, all of which resulted in an extremely slow posthurricane recovery. 1,4 Limited studies on the impact of HM have reported increasing rates of adverse physical and psychological health consequences (e.g., fall-related injuries, leptospirosis infection, anxiety, post-traumatic stress) 5−8 and hurricane-exacerbated environmental effects including persistent hydrological disruption, 2 deterioration of coastal water quality, 9 increased air pollution, 4 and disturbance of forest ecosystems. 10,11 However, little is known about the disruption of HM on drinking water quality that is critical to waterborne/ water-related disease control and public health protection.…”

Spatial-temporal targeted and non-targeted surveys to assess microbiological composition of drinking water in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria

“…are several orders of magnitude lower that what has been published in literature (Huang et al, 2021;Isaac and Sherchan, 2020;Ley et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2019) (i.e., 1-10 4 copies mL -1 ). A potential reason for this could be over-chlorination in the systems, which had been reported in the aftermath of HM (Brown et al, 2018), including in early phase of sampling as this study showed.…”

Long-Term Public Health Responses in High-Impact Weather Events: Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico as a Case Study

“…Another chemical exposure that continues to pose a problem in post-Maria Puerto Rico is heavy-metal-laden coal ash contamination. 8 These types of chemical exposures will lead to short-and long-term health outcomes in any disaster setting, such as chronic heavy metal poisoning and, possibly over time, cancer. Specifically, in terms of children's postdisaster health, there are no mandated federal, state, or local inspections of damaged educational facilities for the safe re-occupancy by children.…”