When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico on September 18, 2022, the U.S. colony had still not fully recovered from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017. Collapsed bridges had not been rebuilt, houses still lacked roofs, and most recovery funds had not been distributed.

Fiona’s rains only added to the woes, causing house collapses on the interior part of the island, devastating mudslides, and a widespread power outage that lasted for weeks. There was no drinking water: The Puerto Rico Aqueducts and Sewers Authority failed to acquire power generators before the storm hit, and drinking water or sewage systems run mainly on electricity. Simple tasks such as getting gas for the generator (for those who had one) or obtaining drinking water could take a whole day—and become life-and-death situations for people with chronic illnesses who needed ventilators or refrigerated insulin.

The three hurricanes severely impacted the island’s wellbeing. But their effects aren’t simply the result of intense storms. These “natural disasters” are political, stemming from a long colonial history culminating in years of austerity imposed by the U.S. With federal and local government support at a standstill, people in the colony are pulling together to make things better. Mutual aid groups and rural water systems have driven recovery pathways across the island, creating a new model for effective disaster recovery.

Puerto Rico’s history is one of exploitation. The island became a Spanish possession in the 1500s, with a colonial governance built on the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the mistreatment of land and animals to develop the coffee, tobacco, and sugar industries.

After the U.S. took control of the island in 1898, tax incentives for U.S. corporations have come and gone, driving increases in poverty, unemployment and emigration. Starting in the 1950s, Operation Bootstrap allowed companies to establish themselves on the island without paying Puerto Rican taxes; then, in 2006, the federal government swung in the other direction, repealing a corporate tax exemption on income originating from U.S. territories. Companies left the island, and the economy plummeted. Currently, 45% of Puerto Rico’s population lives below the poverty line, and its debt is estimated to be more than $70 billion—a debt that has never been audited and was pushed by Wall Street interests.

The U.S. government’s response—decreasing Puerto Rico’s debt through austerity measures—has made the island ever more vulnerable in the face of disaster. Under President Obama, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico was created to develop a deal for debt repayment between Puerto Rico and its creditors. However, the Board knew that paying back the debt would be disastrous for the island. Drastic cuts to the island’s education and health systems, including emergency medical technicians, meant that when Hurricane María hit the island, local agencies had minimal capacity to respond. Another measure, a new public-private partnership for the electric grid, has raised energy costs for consumers and caused regular power outages that create daily disruptions in education, water delivery, and health services. In disaster situations, these become catastrophic.

The U.S. and Puerto Rican governments’ disaster recovery efforts have fallen short for Puerto Ricans. Instead, it is community strategies that have enabled life on the island to continue. Mutual aid efforts—defined as collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually growing from awareness that top-down systems aren’t working—have picked up the slack, establishing relief actions for the island such as providing water, food, shelter, and medicine in remote, mountainous regions.

One of the most important of these solidarity efforts are community aqueducts, which provide drinking water infrastructure to areas that the government’s water utility does not serve. The aqueducts usually consist of a water pump or gravity-driven channel that moves water from wells or small rivers to a central water reservoir. The water is then treated by a chlorine disinfection process, and distributed through pipes to houses, schools, churches, and public pick-up stations.

There are 241 of these aqueducts in Puerto Rico, and they are managed largely by the community residents who they serve. Most systems are operated by neighbors that take care of everything from initial installation to day-to-day oversight. (Aqueducts with greater financial resources tend to hire external operators.) Some members oversee physical components, including daily operations and pipe and plume repairs; others take charge of organizational duties, like organizing and running their assemblies and accounting. The aqueduct organizations can take many forms. Many have one person in charge, others have an informal board of trustees, and a few have 501(c)(3) status and a well-defined structure with positions such as president and chief operator.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, community aqueducts were often the only means communities had to access potable water. Having clean water allowed Puerto Ricans to recover some sort of normality, allowing them to clean, do laundry, and flush toilets. In addition, having drinking water saved residents hours that would otherwise be invested in buying or collecting it from public pickup stations.

The network created by the aqueducts also served a more expansive mutual aid role, becoming a conduit for collecting essential goods from foundations and NGOs and redistributing them to residents in need. Members drew on the aqueducts’ networks to facilitate resource-sharing. For example, a member of one community aqueduct in Añasco shared with me that because one person in the community had an excavator available to loan to the post-María cleanup effort, aqueduct managers were able to quickly remove debris and get their system back up and running.

While community aqueducts have had success, they are not immune to the political and economic factors that constrain life in Puerto Rico. They deal with high costs for water tests and privatized energy, and marginalization from local agencies. But they are paving the way for new directions in the recovery and collective organizing. They underscore how collaboration can put even limited resources in motion to tackle emergency needs, in ways that are often more effective than government-sponsored relief efforts.

Mutual aid’s success doesn’t mean that governments should walk away. On the contrary, the U.S. and Puerto Rico should learn from these community strategies how to better respond in times of need. They should support community aqueducts and mutual aid groups, heeding their needs and concerns, and removing bureaucratic hurdles to accessing funds. There is progress: Legislation introduced on the island this year includes community aqueducts on an advisory committee developing drinking water strategies for the island.

As more and more extreme weather events take place across the world, building and maintaining solidarity networks that recognize our mutual interdependence are crucial to a resilient future. Puerto Rico’s mutual aid strategies offer an example to follow as we rethink disaster preparedness.

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In the near future, information technology may provide new, more effective ways to organize disaster response. We’ve already seen the power of Twitter to coordinate political revolution, and we’ve seen the Pokémon Go augmented reality game motivate tens of thousands of people to get outdoors and chase imaginary monsters. What if, in response to crises, augmented and alternate reality games like Pokémon Go switched into a mode that rewarded players for donating blood? Delivering water bottles? Filling sandbags? Offering temporary housing? Or evacuating areas threatened by storm, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, or other hazards?

Author and game designer Jane McGonigal popularized the notion of gamification, in which players can get points, badges, or other rewards for ordinarily mundane tasks. According to McGonigal and others like Ian Bogost, gamification can motivate us to recover from personal setbacks including injury, depression, or distress, and improve our lives by forming new habits or skills. For example, Duolingo allows people to learn a language online while translating online documents and websites. Students earn skill points as they complete lessons or translate web content, and the complexity of sentences increases as the user progresses. Other games use competition and peer pressure among neighbors to reduce electricity consumption when appeals to saving money and the environment don’t work.

So gamification can work in our private lives. But what if we combined gamification and the sharing economy to coordinate the manpower of gamers for the public good in response to disaster? Already Airbnb’s disaster response unit allows hosts to open their homes to storm victims. Uber has offered free rides to facilitate evacuation of areas during emergencies like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Dallas police shootings. In this way, the sharing economy taps into the empathetic human impulse to do meaningful and pro-social work in response to need. Maybe all Pokémon Go players need is a little nudge in the direction of emergency response tasks when disaster strikes.

Such an emergency response system would be a logical extension of the emergency broadcast system. If you haven’t cut the cord, you’re probably familiar with the EBS regularly interrupting television and radio programming. And we all know about the alerts that get pushed out to our mobile phones to warn us of dangerous weather (or, as recently occurred in the New York City area, an alleged terrorist on the run). While these broadcasts go over public airwaves, they have always been delivered to our private communications equipment—temporarily seizing control of private property for a public purpose.

What the EBS system doesn’t do is facilitate or coordinate a response. A more appropriate emergency system for the social media age is one that does not merely push messages—but that also mobilizes communities, to collect intelligence from them or to take other action. Already apps like Google Maps, Waze, and Swift.ly collect real-time information on traffic flows and incidents. These kinds of apps would just need augmented reality disaster response modes that encourage coordinated emergency actions, helping create community resilience. We could call it an Emergency Interaction System.

That might sound a little techno-utopian, but there are precedents. Emergency response organizations like the Red Cross already have extensive experience using table-top simulations and simulation learning tools to train personnel and prepare adaptive responses. If the Red Cross integrated these simulations with networked sharing-economy apps and augmented reality games, it could mobilize and coordinate an extraordinary group of volunteers and private resources on a scale that might rival official government efforts.

An app called SwingVoter Go is an example of serious game inspired by Pokémon Go. The game sought to motivate people to become more engaged in the 2016 election by inspiring gamers who don’t live in swing states to influence voters who do. It would prompt you to pick any battleground state, like Florida or Pennsylvania, and use Facebook to find people in your social network from those states that you can engage in election-related conversations. SwingVoter Go provides “lures” that you can share on social media to draw undecided voters into a conversation with you with the goal of influencing them to vote for a particular candidate. If successful you increase the collective score of the game as well as get one step closer to becoming a “swing master.”

In a similar way, an emergency interactive disaster response system could use social media and augmented reality to connect people with needs to those who want to help. By building a “Red Cross mode” into existing apps, emergency response tasks could appear instead of Pokémons or other lures, and players could earn hero points for finding or distributing emergency supplies, providing transportation to shelters, making charitable donations, or helping clean up. Players could opt out, but building an emergency mode into existing apps would solve the problem of distributing the software ahead of time so that it could be mobilized at a moment’s notice.

Of course, potential catastrophes will require more than human resilience. An Emergency Interactive System does no good if it doesn’t function in an emergency, so technological infrastructure must also be adaptive to stress. We’ve already noticed a degradation of mobile phone signals at crowded venues like music concerts or sporting events, when uploading data-intensive videos and photos can overwhelm mobile phone towers. During massive events, relying on normal tower signals will only exacerbate the disaster—especially in cases that affect the towers themselves. For example, since the loss of service that accompanied hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, several measures have been taken to help make cell phone towers and service more resilient to disaster. Nevertheless, each new catastrophe seems to expose some previously unknown vulnerability, at the worst possible time. What we need from the Emergency Interactive System is a more resilient way of connecting people to one another, so that they can check in on loved ones and participate in recovery efforts.

Fortunately, smartphones are already equipped with the capacity to connect via mesh networks that could allow our disaster response players to drop in and out, bypassing mobile phone towers. For example, FireChat is an app that allows text messaging independent of Wi-Fi and mobile data. The app gained popularity in 2014 when hundreds of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong used it to communicate and coordinate without being intercepted by the Chinese government. Like many other peer-to-peer data sharing apps, FireChat can use Bluetooth connectivity to send messages between devices within about 200 feet of each other—perfect for dense crowds that typically overtax towers.

A new version called FireChat Alert even allows emergency responders to broadcast text messages during a crisis. Originally developed in collaboration with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, FireChat Alert is being tested in a Philippines pilot program to improve communication during and after typhoons. While the app is currently a one-way broadcast medium only, it proves the potential to adapt private, mobile technologies for public purposes, even without existing data towers.

By combining advances in augmented reality games with the sharing economy and mesh networking, we could be poised on the threshold of a revolution in disaster response that empowers the public to follow their natural helpful instincts in response to all kinds of crises, without getting in the way, and even when our electricity, Internet, and/or cell service fails.

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