The storm would lead to the deaths of more than 2,000 Puerto Ricans. It would leave the entire island without electricity for days, and parts of the island without power for months. Virtually the entire agricultural output of the island was destroyed in a day, including a large coffee sector which will take decades to revive, if it ever does.
In the months that followed, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans would flee to the American mainland, abandoning homes, communities and jobs. In the aftermath, commentators worried about how Puerto Rico would ever recover—whether Maria would turn large sections of the island into ghost towns. There was a palpable sense that this disaster would depopulate Puerto Rico.
But another hurricane had already hit Puerto Rico—not Irma, another large storm that had struck Puerto Rico a month earlier, but the fierce cyclone of demographic decline, which made landfall decades before Maria. Puerto Rico’s fertility rate had fallen below replacement by 1997, back when times were supposedly good for the island and before its special tax status was removed. Read Full Article »
