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Hurricane Fiona hit the island of Puerto Rico this weekend as only a Category 1 storm. But despite the weakness of this storm, and despite huge amounts of talk about greater resilience in the wake of Hurricane Maria, almost exactly five years ago, the electrical grid promptly collapsed. 

The island-wide outage reflects very poorly on U.S.-led privatization efforts, which were “​​pitched as a panacea for the island’s troubled grid” after Maria, Kate Aronoff pointed out this week. The widespread blackouts should also serve as a reminder, she noted, that “just $40 million of the $9 billion in federal funds meant to rebuild Puerto Rico’s grid since Maria has been spent.”

Very few of the reforms energy experts have recommended and that receive widespread grassroots support have been implemented. For example, Kate wrote, a more renewables-based and decentralized grid would help:

Electricity from fossil fuels needs to be generated at centralized power plants, a job that falls on PREPA as it still handles electricity generation. Most of the plants are in the south, meaning electrons need to be carried up via transmission lines over the mountainous center of the country to population centers in the north. Queremos Sol (We Want Sun), a platform for clean energy development and climate justice backed by a number of environmental and community groups and unions across the island, has pushed for a more decentralized and renewable grid that can be turned back on even when the grid endures massive damage. So far that hasn’t happened, even after the 2019 passage of a green energy law intended to bring more clean energy onto the grid.

Meanwhile, predatory “vulture funds,” i.e., investors specializing in distressed assets, seek to make a buck off Puerto Rican debt, while the Obama-era Financial Oversight and Management Board has demanded austerity measures and privatization from the island’s government. It’s not hard to see how Puerto Rico’s unequal status in the United States has led to this situation.

Over a million homes remain without power as of the drafting of this newsletter, days after the storm. “It’s a tragedy that most Puerto Ricans saw coming,” Luis Martinez of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Vox’s Umair Irfan earlier this week. And that was only with a Category 1 storm. Climate change will most likely make hurricanes more severe as time goes on. Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than realizing that policymakers saw this coming, yet chose not to act upon it, is the near-certainty that, if they continue on this track, these kinds of avoidable disasters will happen again and again—and get worse.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor