Letter from Puerto Rico: Power outages worsen islanders’ climate change challenges
By hola | Published | No Comments
ARROYO, Puerto Rico – After a summer when temperatures soared here and around the globe, renown chef and food impresario Marina Martínez López laments the parched and desolate state of her garden.
(photo by Angel Luis Edmon Dante)
“I’ve had a cemetery in my backyard. Everything is dying” from the heat, says Martínez López of the fresh produce she grows with care and dedication for her del huerto a la mesa (from garden to table) food truck business, Perla’s Brunch Bistro Del Mar.
In the age of climate change, it’s getting hard to make her business model work, given its reliance on cultivating so many of her most delectable ingredients in her own garden. And that’s far from the only challenge of operating her outdoor food business in the municipality of Luquillo, a beach town on the island’s northeast coast. She says she’s contended with tropical storms and high winds and “heatwaves in the kitchen” that she says leave food workers like herself physically drained and struggling to maintain their businesses.
Over the summer, I delved into the pressing issue of climate change as a remote intern on Hola Cultura’s SPEL Society and Culture storytelling team. Through research and interviewing, I examined the disparate impacts our changing climate is having on the vulnerable residents of Washington, D.C., where Hola Cultura is based, and my beloved homeland, Puerto Rico.
Worldwide the summer of 2023 saw the hottest three-month period ever recorded from June through August, the World Meteorological Organization announced on Sept. 6, as D.C. happened to be living through an early September heat wave, a five-day stretch that marked the longest late summer heat wave since records were first kept in 1872, the Washington Post reported. Temperatures neared 100 degrees with the heat index making it feel a few degrees hotter. But the District’s summer can hardly compare to Puerto Rico, where the heat index soared as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit in early June. By Sept. 29, heat indices on the island were still registering 108 and 111 degrees, even as Tropical Storm Philippe barreled toward it on maximum sustained winds of 50 miles per hour. With two months left in this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, 17 storms, including six hurricanes, put 2023 within striking distance of 2020’s record of 23 storms, according to a Sept. 26 report by Jonathan Erdman, a meteorologist at that Weather Channel.
As I learned from Hola Cultura’s reporting on D.C.’s heat islands, climate change is hurting the poor and disenfranchised the most. Both in Washington, D.C. and here in the heart of the Caribbean, vulnerable populations are grappling with the accelerating consequences of climate change. But in Puerto Rico, climate-related misery is compounded by intermittent power outages.
During 2023’s heat waves, islanders have sought shelter indoors with air conditioning and fans, but the repeated failures of the island’s fragile electric grid have left thousands of people at any given time sweltering in the dark without refrigeration. ABC News reported last summer that more than a million people had lost power at one time or another since Hurricane Maria swept a destructive path across the island in 2017.
Puerto Rico stands at a critical crossroads, grappling with the onslaught of merciless heat and questions about how to chart a course toward a more sustainable and resilient future. A Caribbean island territory of the U.S. located about 1,000 miles off the coast of Miami, Puerto Rico is already seeing rising sea levels, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, and increased flooding and droughts. The island’s soaring heat indexes, meanwhile, mean more days each year when life-threatening heat poses health risks for everyone, but particularly for people with existing health conditions such as cardiovascular, kidney, and respiratory problems.
For this story, I focused on three communities on the east side of the island that are facing profound and multifaceted impacts of climate change in their daily lives. Besides Luquillo, they are Salinas, a fishing town on the southeast of the island, and Barrio Cubuy, a community mostly composed of older, retired citizens in the east coast municipality of Naguabo. Similar to Puerto Rico as a whole, U.S. Census data shows that about half of the residents of the three municipalities live in poverty. Citizens 65 years old or older are the largest age demographic in these three communities as well, compounding the rising challenges of climate change.
Puerto Rico’s culinary enterprises, like chef Martínez López’s food truck, are not the only businesses facing challenges. On the Caribbean coast, the memory of Hurricane Maria’s destruction still lingers in the minds of Jessica Ortiz and Domingo Alvarado. The deadly hurricane tore away the roof of their agrocenter and pet shop, El Shaddai Jireh, when it careened through the Caribbean in September 2017 leading to the deaths of at least 1,400, according to the Puerto Rican government, though independent experts put the total fatalities much higher.
At El Shaddai Jireh, the hurricane also resulted in the deaths of livestock and spoiled their crops and animal feed. The mention of another hurricane is enough to have them on edge. In fact, during hurricane season, there’s a somber wariness in every Puerto Rican household.
Since Hurricane Maria struck, Alvarado has prepared for more storms.
“I put a new industrial roof that is stronger and is tied with cables so that they resist a little more,” Alvarado says. However, he notes that those improvements only address extreme storms and cannot help El Shaddai Jireh with the growing number of extreme heat days.
In the past few months, as temperatures soared outside, they rose even higher inside El Shaddai Jireh’s once sheltering walls. He says their dogs succumbed to heat exposure, while farmed fish growing in the agrocenter’s tanks died as the indoor heat pushed water temperatures higher too, says Alvarado. The heat also brings out small black weevils called gorgojos that spoil animal feed and other essential food sources for birds and dogs.
“The heat causes them to come out,” says Alvarado, who also said this year’s heat-related losses bring back bad memories of the financial loss Hurricane Maria brought to this family’s business.
About a two-hour drive east of Salinas, Jimmy Piña Martínez lives in Barrio Cubuy in the town of Naguabo. A respected local resident, Piña Martínez retired from his job as a heavy equipment operator and mechanic in 2011 due to health reasons and decided to dedicate his life to community work.
As the president of El Comité Desarrollo Barrio Cubuy Inc, a civic organization that fights for the well-being of the community and its residents, Piña Martínez directs the organization’s work clearing roads after intense storms and hurricanes and for improvements to government services.
“We focus on various things,” he says, including “advocating for services that the government is supposed to provide but doesn’t…”
He paints a vivid picture of the consequences of climate change, describing landslides triggered by excessive rainfall. During Hurricane Fiona last September, for example, he says cascading mud covered an entire house and blocked passage to a road nearby.
But too much water is just one climate change-fueled transformation. Once powerful rivers are a fraction of what they once were, says Piña Martínez, another sign that the environment is changing, driven by drought and heat. He recounts memories of children playing in Blanco River and other nearby waterways, something you don’t see much now that their water levels have declined so dramatically.
“Now the rivers here – I can assure you – are a quarter, if not less, of what they once were,” Piña Martínez says. “Never in my life have I seen the Blanco’s riverbed entirely covered with grass,” as it is in places today.
The abundant elephant grass, or hierba de elfante in Spanish, is a threat to the area’s native wildlife. Piña Martínez explains how the invasive plant weaves its roots deep into the soil, threatening crops, rivers, roads, and human health. He says elephant grass grows with an insidious tenacity that defies easy eradication despite his organization’s intensive efforts to keep roads and land clear of it.
“We cut it ourselves. Many times, we use the pickaxes to pull it out,” Piña Martínez says. “Sometimes you have to put on a facemask because in hot weather the leaves release a type of fuzz that leaves you with a tremendously congested throat. Many times you have to use herbicide to be able to dry it and finish it off. [Otherwise] it takes over all the other fruit and covers them until it kills them.”
Climate change is also to blame for the elephant grass’ insidious march across Barrio Cubuy. Climate scientists say the world is already locked in to some degree of warming, meaning more extreme heat days, regardless of whether U.S. and other governments meet their climate change promises intime to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. But as dire as those locked-in changes may be and how the heat has affected her business, it’s how to fix the island’s troubled electricity provider, LUMA Energy, that comes first to mind when I ask about the environmental injustices most affecting her community.
“[T]he essential system of LUMA does not work,” she says, referring to the island’s only power provider, LUMA Energy.
LUMA pledged to address long standing reliability issues with the island’s electric grid, according to news reports, when the U.S.-Canadian joint venture took over Puerto Rico’s power transmission and distribution in 2021. But since then, it has presided over a series of rate increases (Puerto Ricans pay significantly more than the national average for electricity) but power outages have persisted with thousands without electricity today.
during a blackout (photo by Paola Manzano)
LUMA has faced widespread protests and relentless criticism. At the height of 2023’s summertime heat, more than 100,000 islanders were without power on Jun. 6, and over 120,000 on Jul. 19, according to El Vocero de Puerto Rico. Despite public outcry and calls to cancel the contract, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority granted LUMA an extension on its temporary contract last fall.
It’s hard to come up with an exact estimate of how many people have been affected using the limited information on outages made public by LUMA. Many Puerto Ricans had turned to PowerOutage.us, an independent website that collects and shares information on outages nationwide, but it stopped sharing LUMA data for Puerto Rico earlier this year at the company’s request.
The scorching heat this summer has sparked a surge in energy consumption across the island, raising concerns about the resilience of the island’s electrical infrastructure. These concerns, along with deeper worries about the toll the outages take on human health, have spilled out into social media.
Ada Monzón, chief meteorologist at Wapa TV, a Spanish-language independent television station in the territory’s capital, San Juan, tweeted: “Being without power during extreme heat events is a serious risk and can even lead to death.”
Dianerys Calderon, a Telemundo reporter, posted an Instagram video documenting a power surge in the neighborhood Barrio Mamey in Juncos, a city in the eastern central region of Puerto Rico. Her post highlighted how the surges and outages are a life-or-death matter to Esther, a 76-year-old resident who relies on an oxygen tank.
Martínez López shares those concerns about her neighbors in Luquillo and how the elderly and other vulnerable residents can cope when the electricity goes out.
“The majority live on oxygen and machines, they need certain electrical equipment to live, period. It’s a reality,” says Martínez López of the elderly, who represent a large part of Luquillo’s population.
Like a growing number of Puerto Rican residents, Martínez López has resorted to installing solar panels, but high temperatures diminish battery life and escalate the risk of battery malfunction. Martínez López learned first hand when her solar panels overheated earlier this summer, causing four batteries to break down and leak battery fluid. At a replacement cost of $499 apiece, she says the fact that the batteries failed so quickly shows how the solar solution is not as invincible as advertised.
“You, college students, are affected a lot more because you depend on Puerto Rico’s electrical system to take classes,” adds Martínez López, honing in on my reality. As a college student in today’s hybrid learning environment, it also means having to explain to professors and supervisors why an assignment or email wasn’t sent on time.
Selective power outages are forcing a new reality for Puerto Ricans, one that entails things like driving home and not knowing whether the power is going to be on and learning to sleep to the rumbling sounds of generators.
We live in a digital world now. Puerto Rico wants to be a part of it so badly, with constant online assignments, remote jobs, and energy-powered medical treatments, but LUMA keeps standing in its way.
– Story by Paola Manzano
– Copy edited by Yaretzi Chavez
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