Storm’s daunting death toll
President Trump last week judged his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico “a fantastic job.” His assessment sounded a lot like the notorious post-Hurricane Katrina performance review President George W. Bush gave his overmatched emergency czar, Michael Brown, whom he congratulated for “a heckuva job.” As famously wrong as Bush was, his mistake pales against Trump’s willful indifference to the U.S. territory and the truth of what happened there.
Unlike Bush’s gaffe, delivered days after Katrina devastated New Orleans, Trump spoke nearly a year after Maria — and a day after the most definitive study to date estimated that the hurricane caused the deaths of nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans. That is more than were lost to Katrina, which killed an estimated 1,833, and makes Maria the United States’ deadliest storm in more than a century.
Trump had previously defended the administration’s handling of the disaster based on an official death toll of 16 that eventually rose to 64 — still an absurdly low figure that few experts took seriously, but one that nevertheless remained in place until last week. Several widely ranging subsequent estimates generally put the figure in the thousands. After the latest study, led by George Washington University researchers at the request and with the participation of Puerto Rico’s government, Gov. Ricardo Roselló changed the official toll to 2,975.
Unlike the previous figure, which was limited to deaths directly caused by flooding, collapsing buildings and other immediate ravages of the storm last September, the latest captures the slow-motion disaster that unfolded over the ensuing months due to the extended interruption of electricity, medical care and other services, particularly in the island’s poor, rural areas. The researchers arrived at the figure by comparing the total number of deaths on the island from September through February to the normal number during such a period, yielding close to 3,000 excess deaths.
The tragedy of the heavy toll is compounded by the fact that most of the deaths were a result of the extraordinary delays in restoring power and other services. More than the instant impact of a storm, such deaths can be prevented by competent emergency preparedness and response. As such, they directly implicate public officials.
Puerto Rico and its electric utility were facing insolvency before Maria, and the new study found the island was ill-prepared for the emergency in several respects. The government’s failure to correct the death toll until last week is also troubling.
But the federal government is as relevant here as it was in 2005. Unfortunately, Trump was a veritable caricature of callousness in the wake of the disaster, playing golf, blaming the “big water” surrounding the island and chucking paper towels at beleaguered residents. It’s possible that federal emergency officials transcended the president’s poor leadership, but that isn’t what the results suggest.
Several members of Congress have called for an independent inquiry into the storm and its aftermath like that of the 9/11 Commission. Their case is bolstered by the similarly daunting number of Americans lost in this disaster.