Outrage as Puerto Rico hurricane death toll rockets to 2,975
THE death toll from the hurricane that struck Puerto Rico in September last year has been increased from 64 to 2,975 – a 50-times jump that has sparked a new wave of criticism for the government response to the disaster.
A study ordered by the governor of the US territory recommended the revised toll for deaths that could be directly or indirectly attributed to Hurricane Maria and its aftermath, in a period from September 2017 to mid-February this year.
Maria was the most powerful storm to hit the Caribbean island for a century, and witnesses to the devastation said the previous official toll seemed a serious underestimate.
The figure was used by Donald Trump’s then acting homeland security secretary Elaine Duke, who 12 days into the disaster characterised the federal response as “a really good news story” and spoke of a “limited number of deaths”.
Mr Trump said in early October 2017 he was happy with the federal response to Maria, saying it compared favourably with a “real catastrophe like Katrina”.
Deaths blamed on Hurricane Katrina in 2005 range from about 1,200 to more than 1,800, with most along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi.
Criticism of the federal response existed at the time: in a scathing reaction, San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz appeared on CNN declaring: “Damn it, this is not a good news story.
“This is a people are dying story. This is a life or death story.”
And US Representative Nydia Velázquez, a New York Democrat, said the study was “only the latest to underscore that the federal response to the hurricanes was disastrously inadequate, and as a result, thousands of our fellow American citizens lost their lives”.
Researchers from George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health derived the latest figures by comparing predicted mortality under normal circumstances with recorded mortality, revealing that deaths documented after the storm were 22pc higher than forecast.
They also took into account the displacement of 241,000 residents who fled the island in the immediate aftermath of the storm.
The poor and elderly were also disproportionately hard hit in terms of risk of fatalities.
Researchers attributed under-counting of stormrelated deaths to poor communications and the lack of well-established guidelines and training for physicians on how to certify deaths in major disasters.