Nothing except war tears apart the seams of civilization like a natural disaster. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 4,645 people died in Puerto Rico last year because of Hurricane Maria, about 20 times as many as the official government count. The authors, from Harvard University, conducted a household survey that included indirect deaths, such as someone being cut off from access to medicine, in addition to direct deaths like being struck by a tree limb. The study drives home the vital safety purpose of infrastructure resilience. ENR’s cover story (6/11 p. 10) showed that Texas and Puerto Rico are particularly unprepared for the next hurricane. The solution is to fix the economic incentives involved.
Congress once gave favorable tax exemptions to companies that operated in Puerto Rico—a U.S. territory—but the exemptions gradually expired, and by the time they finally ended in 2006, many companies had already left. Congress also gave tax exemptions for the island’s municipal bonds, but the borrowing went too far. And with Wall Street as the facilitator, Puerto Rico borrowed extensively. The result now is a complex bankruptcy involving several Puerto Rican spending authorities and government departments. It is a terrible situation in which to rebuild.