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NASA Images of Puerto Rico Reveal How Maria Wiped Out Power On the Island (jalopnik.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Jalopnik: Hurricane Maria was the most devastating hurricane to make land in Puerto Rico in nearly 100 years and the country is still reeling in its wake. Much of the island still doesn't have running water, reliable communication or electricity. Recently, NASA published a set of date-processed photos that show the island's nighttime lights both before and after the storm. Here, you can see images of the country's capital, San Juan, on a typical night before Maria. It's based on cloud-free and low moonlight conditions. Conversely, the following composite image is of data taken on the nights of Sept. 27 and 28 -- nearly a week after the storm hit -- by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, a scanning radiometer that collects visible and infrared imagery of land, atmosphere, cryosphere and oceans, according to NASA's website.
... it might be a sensible idea to bury electric cables rather than running them around on fragile masts and poles everywhere?
Re:It's all Trump's fault
Well all that hot air has to go somewhere
Puerto Rico's government drove the island to bankruptcy.:
With its creditors at its heels and its coffers depleted, Puerto Rico sought what is essentially bankruptcy relief in federal court on Wednesday, the first time in history that an American state or territory had taken the extraordinary measure.
The action sent Puerto Rico, whose approximately $123 billion in debt and pension obligations far exceeds the $18 billion bankruptcy filed by Detroit in 2013, to uncharted ground.
Of course the pols in charge in Puerto Rico are now casting about blame to deflect attention from their own contributory negligence.
These photographs don't shed any light on how the grid was wiped out. It just shows how much. Which we already know. Just a little bit more graphic. That is all.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I love how, in the comparison images, someone actually felt the need to label darker areas as "less lights" and brighter areas as "more lights."
Also, how pedantic would it be of me to point out that it should be "fewer" lights, not "less"?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
While other states have representatives to bring home pork spending, Puerto Rico does not. In addition, the median household income is $18K compared to Mississippi, where where the per capita income is $40K. How much can you really tax a household that only makes $18K? No companies will target Puerto Rico as a market. It's expensive to ship food there from the COTUS. In addition, if the island was already in debt, a substantial portion of the revenues are going to pay off the debug.
So it's easy to say the government "drove the island to bankruptcy" implying that funds are being mismanaged. Even a new government would not be able to change the status quo because they are starting from such a deep hole. When the federal government needs to get out of a recession, they use deficit spending, and the closest thing a state can do to do that (which is not really ethical but there are no other options) is to issue bonds, and then default on them (bankruptcy).
A large part of the challenges that Peurto Rico faces is that it is not in fact a country, but rather it is an "unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeast Caribbean Sea".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.thoughtco.com/puer...
Peraps if Peurto Rico was a country (or a "state" within the United States), they might have been better able to respond to the types of problems that this storm has caused.
WIth a population of a bit more than 3.4 million, the territory seems to have more people than twenty-two other US states:
http://worldpopulationreview.c...
Because our $20 trillion in debt is caused by $400,000 grants. Give me a break, our debt is caused by our defense spending (your "heroes"). They are protecting our Homeland after all.
PR should become a state or become an independent country. There shouldn't be any middle ground. However I know many, many PRicans who do want the middle way. They want it to remain as it is. "This is what was agreed to 100 years ago - and we ought to stick with it."
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
If you look at the pics, you'll notice the areas with buildings that had distributed microgrids of power, as in houses with some solar or wind that could be protected or taken indoors, were the first to regain power, followed by diesel backup generators that either pre-existed or were provided by the military or commercial/private interests.
While it is true that undergrounding is a good choice, it would not have prevented blown transformers, flooded power generation sites, storm damage to all utility power generation, so bringing the grid back up becomes very difficult. You have to isolate the cells and bring them back up one by one. Problem is the load is too high. Modern equipment mostly goes to off mode (e.g. furnaces shut down during power interruption, fridges go to quiet/standby mode), but there's a lot of old equipment on islands.
Current Energy Policy articles recommend that most islands go to sustainable/resilient renewable microgrids with both battery (e.g. Tesla PowerWall and equivalent (cheaper to make yourself)) and CNG/LNG power backups.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --