As Hurricane Harvey slammed Texas and Hurricane Irma hit Florida, Americans watched to see if their government would do better than after Katrina 12 years ago. But Harvey and Irma were nothing like Katrina. Maria, which slammed the US territory of Puerto Rico last week, is — and now’s America’s chance to show it can do better. One lesson: First aid should be fast; rebuilding prescriptions, slow.
Harvey and Irma were devastating to millions, to be sure. But in Houston, amazingly, the power never went out for most of the city, thanks to upgrades made after previous storms.
With power, you have lights — and safety. With power, you can keep hospitals running.
In Florida, the power did go out. But Florida has a strong power grid, whose owners invested heavily to make it even stronger after past storms.
Florida Power Light, which serves half the state, told its customers before Irma hit that it had put $3 billion into the system over the past 12 years to make it better able to resist flood and wind. Those upgrades helped it to restore power to “essentially all” its customers within 10 days.
Puerto Rico is different. Gov. Ricardo Rosselló says power will be out for weeks or months.
Puerto Rico can get some power much faster, and already is. Big generators combined with the hundreds of electric-industry workers who are already descending from the mainland with emergency equipment can likely re-power critical sites in days, and major population centers in days or weeks.
That’s a long time if you don’t have power. But the United States is already doing better than after Katrina in getting food, water, medicine and other critical aid to people fast.
Before Maria hit, FEMA has “pre-positioned” aid at a San Juan warehouse — something it didn’t do well before Katrina, where the Superdome shelter ran out of food and water before the storm had passed.
FEMA is running flights to bring more supplies. New York is helping, collecting critical items — diapers and baby food — and flying them down.
Triage, though critical, is the easier part. It’s what happens later becomes harder.
Some people see acres of devastation, or even partial damage, as a tragedy, and a chance to help the people who live there rebuild in a way they think best. Others see a blank slate — and a chance to make radical changes.
That was true after Katrina, where urban planners tried to remake New Orleans, declaring low-lying but heavily populated areas off-limits to rebuilding (residents successfully resisted).
And it was true after 9/11, when star architects proposed zany ideas for Ground Zero.
Puerto Rico has something in common with Katrina that complicates rebuilding: It is poor — far poorer, in fact, than New Orleans. Both New Orleans and Puerto Rico, pre-storm, had lots of natural affordable housing — housing that’s “affordable” because it’s old and dilapidated, though livable. Only half of Puerto Rico’s houses have insurance, according to The Wall Street Journal. But even with insurance, rebuilding new and fast is expensive and unaffordable to poor people.
Washington, then, should resist the urge to use the storm as an excuse to raze neighborhoods wholesale — and offer smaller-scale help to people who want to rebuild, slowly, in place. Some of that help can be as simple as depots with free, or cheap, building supplies, for people who know how to do this work, or are willing to learn.
In San Juan and other dense areas, it may make sense to rebuild taller in return for better flood-protection infrastructure. But any decision should wait for evacuees to get over their initial shock. And while Puerto Rico can rely on a stopgap electrical system for a while, building a mainland-style grid will take billions — billions that customers don’t have.
This, too, will require government subsidy — subsidy that will have to be paid, in part, by the bondholders to whom Puerto Rico already owes money (remember, Puerto Rico is officially bankrupt, and already not paying its debt to investors).
Washington may have to offer low-interest or zero-interest loans to a new power company with a proven track record to do this work — with the loans taking priority of repayment over existing creditors to Puerto Rico’s long-failed power firm.
In fact, all creditors, whether new government ones or old private-sector ones, will have a stake in making sure the new Puerto Rico can better attract higher-paying jobs and better create a middle class — but not by using the storm as an excuse to make huge changes that people will only resist.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.