Puerto Rico. Advanced showing of what collapse looks like.

Puerto Rico now seems to be the first nation state, such as it is, to be destroyed by climate change……

Now of course I am not saying that Hurrican Maria was caused by climate change, but the likelihood of it being hit twice in a week by two such powerful storms can only be put down to the unusually hot waters of the Atlantic Ocean. That it was totally destroyed can only be put down to bad management, and a history of US laisser faire with regards to its economy. Puerto Rico is a colony of the USA, not a state. It’s been treated by rich US citizens (including Donald Trump) as somewhere to go for idyllic tropical holidays, and not much else. For these things to happen, Puerto Rico was made to borrow well beyond its capacity to repay, it was bankrupt before the hurricane, there are no words to describe its position today. Except perhaps as a failed state, except it was never really a state in charge of its own destiny. And it now seems to be abondoned by the US, tossed into the garbage like an old unwanted disused toy.

The one resource that stands out as lacking is diesel…..

This from the Organic Prepper…:

Hospitals are struggling to keep people alive.

And speaking of hospitals, 59 of the 69 on the island were, according to the Department of Defense, “operating on unknown status.”

Only 11 of 69 hospitals on Puerto Rico have power or are running on generators, FEMA reports. That means there’s limited access to X-ray machines and other diagnostic and life-saving equipment. Few operating rooms are open, which is scary, considering an influx of patients with storm-related injuries. (source)

A hospital in San Juan reported that two people in intensive care died when the diesel fueling the generator ran out. The children’s hospital has 12 little ones who depend on ventilators to survive, and once they ran out of fuel, they have gotten by on donations. FEMA has delivered diesel fuel to 19 hospitals.

But many darkened hospitals are unable to help patients who need it most.

Without sufficient power, X-ray machines, CT scans, and machines for cardiac catheterization do not function, and generators are not powerful enough to make them work. Only one in five operating rooms is functioning. Diesel is hard to find. And with a shortage of fresh water, another concern looms: a possible public health crisis because of unsanitary conditions…

The hospitals have been crippled by floods, damage and shortages of diesel. The governor said that 20 of the island’s hospitals are in working order. The rest are not operational, and health officials are now trying to determine whether it is because they lack generators, fuel or have suffered structural damage. All five of the hospitals in Arecibo, Puerto Rico’s largest city in terms of size, not population, are closed. (source)

Now who would have thought that diesel keeps people alive………? On an island running on 100% renewables? The latest reports say the island may not get its electricity back for 12 months…..

There is of course also no food and water, and it’s a week now since Maria lashed those poor people. FEMA apparently dropped 4.4 million meals there, for 3.5 million people. You do the maths. Yet it appears that earlier in the 20th Century, Puerto Rico produced 70% of its food; but thanks to American management and love affair with debt, this slowly made all that disappear making the island fat and lazy and reliant on ever more debt to survive instead of concentrating on self sufficiency. After all, money is more important than food, right…….?

There is hardly any potable water.

Nearly half the people in Puerto Rico are without potable drinking water. The tap water that is restored has to be boiled and filtered, and others are finding water where they can. You can expect a health crisis soon due to waterborne illnesses. When I researched my book about water preparedness, I learned that waterborne illness is one of the deadliest threats post-disaster. Although FEMA has delivered 6.5 million liters of water, on an island with 3.4 million people, it isn’t enough.

Isabel Rullán is the co-founder and managing director of a non-profit group called ConPRmetidos. She is very concerned about the water situation. She said that even if people were able to acquire water “they may not have the power or means to boil or purify it.”

She added that the problem went beyond access to drinking water — it was becoming a real public health concern.

Compounding that issue was hospitals lacking diesel and being unable to take new patients, she said.

“There’s so much contamination right now, there’s so many areas that are flooded and have oil, garbage in the water, there’s debris everywhere,” she said by phone.

“We’re going to have a lot of people that are potentially and unfortunately going to get sick and may die,” she said. (source)

According to the Department of Defense, 56% of the island has potable water, but in one town, Arecibo, the only fresh water comes froma single fire hydrant. (source)

70,000 people were evacuated (to God knows where….) because a 90 year old dam could fail any day. As there’s no money – I can only surmise – the dam was not inspected for four years, when such an old piece of infrastructure should have yearly assessments. As we know here, crumbling infrastructure is the first sign of collapse.

I could not help, however, thinking that this might be an opportunity. Puerto Rico could tell the USA to go to hell, and take its debts along for the ride. After all, its chances of paying it back now really are zero..! Not everyone will make it of course. The injured, elderly, diabetics, those in blacked out hospitals, not to mention those with no idea of how to deal in a post technology world, will almost certainly die. As I often say, nobody gets out alive. It’s how you check out that matters.

In all that destruction, there are many resources left. No shortage of building materials, perhaps even enough left over solar panels and peripherals to generate a modicum of electricity to run tools…. I can’t tell, not many people are thinking straight yet, and the media is so fickle that most bulletins are about what some clown rapper is going to sing at a footy grand final, Houston and Florida are already off the media screens. Why would anyone be interested in the beginning of global collapse…?

Richard Heinberg is thinking straight…. this article has just hit my newsfeed as I type:

A shrinking economy, a government unable to make debt payments, and a land vulnerable to rising seas and extreme weather: for those who are paying attention, this sounds like a premonition of global events in coming years. World debt levels have soared over the past decade as central banks have struggled to recover from the 2008 global financial crisis. Climate change is quickly moving from abstract scenarios to grim reality. World economic growth is slowing (economists obtusely call this “secular stagnation”), and is likely set to go into reverse as we hit the limits to growth that were first discussed almost a half-century ago. Could Puerto Rico’s present presage our own future?

If so, then we should all care a great deal about how the United States responds to the crisis in Puerto Rico. This could be an opportunity to prepare for metaphoric (and occasionally real) storms bearing down on everyone.

It’s relatively easy to give advice from the sidelines, but I do so having visited Puerto Rico in 2013, where I gave a presentation in the Puerto Rican Senate at the invitation of the Center for Sustainable Development Studies of the Universidad Metropolitana. There I warned of the inevitable end of world economic growth and recommended that Puerto Rico pave the way in preparing for it. The advice I gave then seems even more relevant now:

• Invest in resilience. More shocks are on the way, so build redundancy in critical systems and promote pro-social behavior so that people’s first reflex is to share and to help one another.
• Promote local food. Taking advantage of the island’s climate, follow the Cuban model for incentivizing careers in farming and increase domestic food production using permaculture methods.
• Treat population decline as an opportunity. Lots of people will no doubt leave Puerto Rico as a result of the storm. This represents a cultural and human loss, but it also opens the way to making the size of the population of the island more congruent with its carrying capacity in terms of land area and natural resources.
• Rethink transportation. The island’s current highway-automobile dominance needs to give way to increased use of bicycles, and to the provision of streetcars and and light rail. An interim program of ride- and car-sharing could help with the transition.
• Repudiate debt. Use aid money to build a sharing economy, not to pay off creditors. Take a page from the European “degrowth” movement. An island currency and a Commonwealth bank could help stabilize the economy.
• Build a different energy system. Patching up the old PREPA electricity generating and distribution system would be a waste of money. That system is both corrupt and unsustainable. Instead, invest reconstruction funds in distributed local renewables and low-power infrastructure.

Richard took the words right out of my mouth….. but what will the authorities do? Obviously nothing since Richard’s vist four years ago. Maybe this disaster will put a fire in ther bellies. Will it do the same elsewhere? i doubt it….. but I’m an old cynic! I have little doubt that Puerto Rico will be offered more debt money to ‘rebuild’ stuff that will be destroyed in the next storm.

Richard finishes with……

Obviously, the Puerto Rican people have immediate needs for food, water, fuel, and medical care. We mainland Americans should be doing all we can to make sure that help reaches those in the throes of crisis. But Puerto Ricans—all Americans, indeed all humans—should be thinking longer-term about what kind of society is sustainable and resilient in this time of increasing vulnerability to disasters of all kinds.

How could you disagree……?