Conference: Unequal Recovery

On October 19, 2022, The League of Cities will sponsor a virtual conference where Drs. Alison Chopel, Antonio Fernós, and Laura Gorbea will share the findings of their study on the relationships between the distribution of federal aid funds after Hurricane Maria and poverty, inequality, and the reported cases of Covid-19, three years after the impact. The transdisciplinary study was made possible thanks to grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and it was published by the Natural Hazards Center in August 2021. PR PASS Workshop is the entity that sponsored the proposal preparation, supported the fieldwork, provided logistics for the events, provided the translation of the findings, and remains committed to disseminating the knowledge.

The study adds the case of Puerto Rico to a body of scientific literature that has studied factors leading to the impoverishment of a region after the occurrence of a natural phenomenon. Although the study confirms that, as in the rest of the states, one year after the damages caused by catastrophic events, where more federal aid is allocated, poverty increases. However, contrary to other jurisdictions in the United States, the study reveals that in Puerto Rico, property damage does not coincide with or explain the rise in poverty, as the observed relationship is inverse to impoverishment. The study suggests that the reported damages were more related to the economic development prior to the hurricane and damages to the municipality's infrastructure. "In other words, the monetary value of the damages seems to coincide with more expensive buildings, but this monetization of damages does not capture the proportional size of the loss of housing and livelihoods of many people. In fact, a better indicator of a town's impoverishment turned out to be the number of deaths caused by Hurricane Maria,” explained the applied anthropologist and co-researcher, Dr. Laura Gorbea, who is also the executive director of the Puerto Rico Public and Applied Social Sciences Workshop (PR PASS Workshop) entity that provided learning opportunities to a dozen students during the investigation.