It’s hard to write this piece as over 3 million Americans sit in the dark, hungry and thirsty. The response from the Federal Government and the various states shows how generous we are on the mainland. We have always overlooked the peculiar governing methods in the countries that we send disaster assistance to. And we will overlook the many ways that Puerto Rico’s governing kleptocracy helped to usher in this disaster.
Fact One:
The electrical generation system and the electrical grid were in lousy shape before Hurricane Maria hit.
Fact Two:
The quality of the drinking water and the potable water distribution system on Puerto Rico were in lousy shape before Hurricane Maria hit.
Puerto Rico’s Electrical System
The US Energy Information Agency states:
Puerto Rico’s electricity is supplied by PREPA, Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, a government agency that owns the electricity distribution system for the main island, Vieques, and Culebra, as well as most generating stations.
Tidbits from that report:
- It serves more customers than any other public electric utility in the United States.
- … for the fiscal year ending in June 2017, petroleum supplied just under half of the island’s electricity, and natural gas supplied nearly one-third. Coal continued to supply about one-sixth of electricity, while renewables supplied about 2.4%
- Puerto Rico’s electricity consumption is a little more than two-fifths of the average in the 50 states.
- … in 2016, PREPA rates were still higher than rates in 49 of the 50 states. Only Hawaii’s rates were higher
- Puerto Rico has no proved petroleum reserves, and the islands neither produce nor refine crude oil.
- … the commonwealth has no proved natural gas reserves and does not produce natural gas.
- Puerto Rico has no coal resources and produces no coal.
Puerto Rico’s Best Hope for Keeping the Lights On (Slate September 22, 2017)
Slate reports that in November, 2016, the government of Puerto Rico received a report on the operations of PREPA that it had commissioned. Here are some of what these outside experts discovered.
- PREPA’s customer outage rate is far higher than other U.S. utilities, and this rate has been increasing over the last two years. PREPA’s own records show that the number of service interruptions experienced by PREPA customers in the past few months of 2016 have been four to five times higher than the average U.S. customer.
- PREPA has an extraordinary amount of baseload generation offline.
- PREPA spent the equivalent of more than a third of its entire capital budget on discretionary Administrative and General spending. [FY 2016]
- To keep its budgets under the cap, PREPA has engaged in what appear to be self‐defeating practices, such as deferring maintenance, extending outages to avoid overtime, and allocating budget away from critical, but low‐utilization units.
- REPA has “deferred” maintenance so often and for so long that required maintenance has become required repairs, and required
repairs have become required replacements - PREPA’s recordkeeping is archaic and unreliable.
- PREPA continues to shed employees even given a labor shortage that it repeatedly cited as a contributory factor in its decreased reliability.
- It is difficult to overstate the level of disrepair or operational neglect at PREPA’s generation facilities.
- In late September 2016, a fire at the Aguirre substation plunged the island into a three‐day blackout, demonstrating that PREPA’s system was so fragile that it was unable to cope with this first contingency.
- PREPA’s monthly SAIFI target is 0.33,.62 or an expectation that on average, a customer will have an outage every three months—or four times per year.
- … data indicates that average PREPA customers experience 11.5 outages every year – around 20 hours’ worth.
- PREPA oversees a system of nearly 1.5 million customers, the majority of which are residential customers (1.3 million).
Slate goes on to note that
Union officials are convinced PREPA chiefs are deliberately letting the system fall apart to strengthen the case for privatization, which the island’s governor declared was inevitable before the hurricanes hit.
Ramos, PREPA’s executive director, noted before Irma that the utility’s plants were vulnerable because no money had been spent on maintenance.
“PREPA’s current weak financial condition will affect the utility’s ability to quickly repair and restore service after this natural disaster,” Moody’s wrote in early September, before Irma.
Miguel A. Soto-Class, president of the Center for a New Economy, a research group on the island, is quoted in the New York Times on September 6 as stating
When the power goes out, the water goes out, because the water authority is the No. 1 client of the power authority.
Puerto Rico’s Water and Sewer System
Who is Supplying Water in Puerto Rico?
About 96% of the population in Puerto Rico receives water from the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA). But the other 4% of the population is supplied by about 240 very small water systems.
Before there was Maria, NBC News [May 10, 2017] looked at Puerto Rico’s water problems and a scathing report by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
70 percent of the island is served by water that violates federal health standards
The data indicates a faulty water treatment process that left behind too much bacteria and carcinogenic chemicals that are also linked to birth defects, as well as aging pipes that contaminated the water with lead and copper.
Conclusion
Both facts stated above appear to have supporting evidence.
- While they may not have expected the 100 percent collapse of the electrical grid, the Puerto Rican government knew that a significant electrical power outage was inevitable.
- It also follows that they knew that any significant outage would affect the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority’s ability to provide water (potable or not).
- It further follows that Puerto Rican government officials have known for some time that the water (provided by a government agency) was unfit for consumption in most of the island.
It is the duty, under Federal law, for states and localities to have a disaster plan. It appears, on the face of it all, that Puerto Rico’s plan was to let it all fall in the toilet and have the Federal government bail them out. And that is almost certain to happen, since Puerto Ricans on the mainland vote. Just as we have done in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti, the local politicians will be enriched, the local populace will be impoverished, and billions of tax dollars will be misspent.