Puerto Rico orders storm deaths recount
The governor of Puerto Rico ordered all government agencies to reopen their books and initiate a recount and review of certified deaths that have occurred since Hurricane Maria, after weeks of reporting by various news outlets pointed to a possible severe undercount of storm fatalities.
The territorial government has attributed 64 official deaths to the storm and its aftermath, but The New York Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting in Puerto Rico have used vital statistics data to show that the number of deaths in the weeks after the storm far exceeded those of the same time period in previous years. The independent analyses put the death count at likely more than 1,000.
Gov. Ricardo Rosselló told The Washington Post last week that there was “no intent to hide the number of deaths” relative to the storm and that “accountability broke down” in the wake of Hurricane Maria. But his government is committed to re-evaluating death certificates that attributed many of the casualties to natural causes.
“We always expected that the number of hurricane-related deaths would increase as we received more factual information - not hearsay and this review will ensure we are correctly counting everybody,” the governor said in a statement Monday.
The government will now reexamine medical records, interview family members and call doctors for more information to determine whether deaths identified as “natural” need to be reclassified. Rosselló cited the time it took to determine the final death toll for Hurricane Katrina to ask for patience as they conduct their review.
Puerto Rico officials have already begun investigating specific cases in the last several weeks, in some cases, after family members or news organizations came forward with stories that were inconsistent with the official account.
In one such case from Orocovis — a municipality in the central mountain range — a doctor indicated natural causes on the person’s death certificate. The body never reached the central processing hub at the Department of Forensic Sciences. There are hundreds of similar cases in which the bodies were quickly cremated.
When the government investigated further, according to Karixia Ortiz, spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, it found that the individual, who suffered from multiple health troubles and relied on an oxygen machine, died the day of the hurricane.
“In the early hours of the day of the hurricane, the power went out in the residence, and when the relatives went to see the person, they found him dead,” according to the Dec. 9 statement from Ortiz. The death was subsequently certified as “indirectly related to the hurricane.”