Rebuilding Puerto Rico after Maria

September 20th

The True Puerto Rico

Electrical System As of July 3: 2,000 PREPA customers still had no electricity. $5.2 billion has been invested into PREPA $1.4 billion for the recovery of the electric grid. PREPA has about $9.6 billion in debt and is facing bankruptcy. In Puerto Rico customers pay 21¢ per Kilowatt/hour; in Florida, 8¢ per Kilowatt/hour. Our government has estimated that $17.6 billion would be needed to rebuild the electric grid. The federal government has promised approximately $2 billion.

Flooding

Infrastructure Over 70,000 homes have been destroyed by the Hurricane. 60,000 Puerto Ricans still use blue tarps as roofs. May: there were over 1,400 poles that were still out of place. The damage costs to the University of Puerto Rico have ascended to $118 million. The Island will receive $20 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program (CDBG DR) in three separate stages within the coming months.

La Virgencita

Toa Baja and Toa Alta

Housing By January: over 1 million applications had been filed with FEMA. Approximately 61% of them have been denied. FEMA has denied 79% of the appeals Main 2 reasons: not enough damages to be eligible lack of title deeds. Over 1,700 Puerto Ricans still spend the night in small hotels throughout the state of Florida.

But… The $35 billion designated are only a third of what the Puerto Rico Government says were the losses caused by the hurricane. But until the beginnings of June, only close to $3.2 billion had been disbursed. That equates to just over 9%. FEMA experienced: personnel shortages was trapped with critically low supplies had problems coordinating logistically and it found itself doing the territorial government's job of responding to the devastation