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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As a sociologist who studies disasters, I wasn’t surprised. I study the role that communities play in avoiding, preparing, responding to, and recovering from disasters. This view holds that while natural hazards are common, they become disasters due to the social conditions in which they happen.

So if a hurricane strikes a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, that’s not considered a disaster. But when a hurricane hits an island that has been in crisis for many years, as was the case in Puerto Rico, the disaster can be very large.

Hurricane Maria lifted the veil on the “broken system” governing everyday life on the island. One common theme in the many conversations I have had with people in Puerto Rico is that Hurricane Maria did not create these conditions. These were the result of years of a weak economy, a political system with little power, underinvestment in infrastructure, and fiscal mismanagement.

This system, broken as it is, has proven to be resilient. In other words: While disasters often provide an opportunity for communities to confront their social and economic realities, it doesn’t always happen that way. There’s no reason to assume that pre-disaster conditions are going to magically be erased after a catastrophic event like a hurricane. They certainly weren’t in Puerto Rico.

One could argue that the current disaster has been centuries in the making. Discovered by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493, Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony for almost 400 years, until it became a territory of the United States after the Spanish-American War. Between 1898 and 1948, Puerto Rican governors were appointed, at first by the U.S. military and later by U.S. presidents with some congressional oversight. It was not until 1948 that Puerto Ricans could elect their own governor. To this day, although they are U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans residing in Puerto Rico cannot vote in presidential elections.

In the mid-1940s, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín developed Operation Bootstrap to modernize Puerto Rico from an agricultural economy into an industrial one—using federal funding to increase manufacturing. This accelerated the economic prospects of the island, but it also led to massive urban developments and an economic system that was fundamentally dependent on federal resources.

By 2016, the government was facing a financial crisis with an outstanding debt of more than $70 billion. Fiscal mismanagement, political pandering, corruption, and nepotism created an ongoing financial and economic crisis that led to a 7 percent population loss from 2010 to 2015, which continues to this day. While the winds of Hurricane Maria eventually stopped, the fury of the financial crisis still pounds the island.

The big challenge for Puerto Rico is how to overcome the realities that Maria revealed. The task is not only how to help the island recover from the current crisis, but how to transform the system so that residents avoid the trap of returning to the broken system that led to the catastrophe in the first place.

Indeed, the experiences of many with whom I spoke suggest that certain issues of the “broken system” manifested themselves before, during, and after the storm. Among them: emergency management plans that were not followed (if they were ever completed, practiced, or implemented); a broken emergency communication system that prevented timely and efficient response by the central government; no-bid contracts; inadequate distribution of supplies at the ports; and the very slow federal response.

The hurricane also revealed the resilient spirit of the Puerto Rican communities, many of which responded quickly during and after the storm. There are countless stories of neighbors checking on the welfare of others, of people finding ways to communicate, and of individuals cooperating to remove debris and get supplies to people when no other services were available.

Another resource has been the Puerto Rican diaspora, which mobilized to get supplies and bring attention to conditions on the island. There are approximately 5.1 million Puerto Ricans living stateside that are concerned about the future of the island and want to be part of the solution. The Puerto Rican diaspora, particularly in Florida, has the political power to hold the federal government responsible for failures in the response to the disaster.

Courting the Puerto Rican electorate has become an essential campaign strategy for political candidates. Nonetheless, much of the courting will likely dissipate if Puerto Ricans do not vote or get involved in the political process. The diaspora also has more financial resources to take on temporary assistance to family members moving stateside looking for better opportunities. However, the diaspora is ideologically divided, particularly over the political status of the island of Puerto Rico, and these divisions have prevented the diaspora from really imposing its considerable power on issues facing the island.

There is no doubt that federal resources are important to the recovery of the island in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis. And the island will certainly be dependent upon the federal government to rebuild the physical structure of the island, particularly its power grid.

Still, it’s a myth that communities without financial resources are helpless in the face of disasters—they still have the capacity to adapt. Social resources are extremely important in disasters. For instance, in my research, I explored how a community of farmworkers in Central Florida was able to build a food shelter and a community emergency plan with little to no financial resources.

Thus, for the people of Puerto Rico, recovery will imply more than financial resources. It will require a new way of thinking, a new beginning driven by innovative ideas to account for the multitude of problems the island is facing. It will require uncomfortable and necessary discussions on past practices that allowed the island to reach this point. In all, it will require a dramatic shift from a dependent path to one that accounts for the realities of being an island nation with economic challenges but enormous social and human capital resources.

Puerto Rico faces a long recovery. While the hurricane was one of the worst disasters to strike the island, not transforming the seemingly resilient “broken system” will have lasting consequences for its future. This is a moment when Puerto Rico can make a break with the past, and move forward in ways that enable all of its communities to mitigate, prepare, respond, and recover from future hurricanes and threats.

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When I visited, six months after Maria, the roadside debris still hadn’t been removed. Electric lines drooped from trees or lay abandoned on the shoulder. Tattered blue tarps served as makeshift roofs. Other houses stood abandoned, missing doors and windows. Power to many rural areas hadn’t been restored, which meant that thousands of people were living without refrigerators and other necessities that we take for granted. Many people had left the island to escape these conditions, and a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that several thousand people may have died because of the storm.

Hurricanes are a natural occurrence, and the island and its people know them well. If you want to study what happens when hurricanes hit tropical forests—which they are doing with increasing frequency—then El Yunque is where you want to be. The forest here was hit hard by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, had considerable damage from Georges in 1998, was side-swiped by Irma in early September 2017 and then floored two weeks later by Maria and her 140-mile-per-hour winds.

For nearly a century, scientists have been observing how El Yunque handles hurricanes. Ecological systems don’t function separately from human systems. Rather, the two are always intertwined. Researchers at El Yunque attempt to parse how human actions—such as building roads, harvesting timber, and diverting water for domestic and municipal use—affect how this forest deals with its periodic hurricanes.

El Yunque is uniquely positioned for not only observing but also measuring what happens when hurricanes “batter” the forest, though scientists like Zimmerman actually use the word “affect.” This is not simply a scientist adhering to a language standard, it’s how the scientists at the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research site routinely describe what happens here. Changes this dramatic and on this grand a scale are natural. These forests have evolved with hurricanes, so they are remarkably resilient. “Everybody asks, ‘How’s the forest?’ It’s a hurricane forest, it has gone through this before. It looks pretty bad right now, but you wait,” Zimmerman said.

He’s confident in its recovery because he and his colleagues have seen it happen before. Since the 1940s, foresters then ecologists and biogeochemists at El Yunque have been staking out their study plots, delineating them with surveyors’ pin flags and white PVC pipe. The forest is further festooned with mesh baskets to measure how many seeds and leaves fall from trees and plants, flagging tape (green, orange, yellow, red) to mark study areas that are monitored regularly, small solar collectors to run equipment, and instruments for recording all sorts of data, including soil nutrients, temperature and humidity, tree diameters, and outputs of methane and nitrous oxide.

The Luquillo research site spans the whole national forest, and Zimmerman is its lead principal investigator as well as director of the El Verde field station—one of two in the forest. Right after Hurricane Maria hit, while the rest of the island was reeling from the loss of power, the scientists at the forest were in a race against time to get back to their measurements. Some of their equipment was buried by leaves and branches torn from the trees above. “In Hurricane Georges, we had some gaps in the data, and I didn’t want that to happen again, so I was just focused on keeping up that rhythm and getting out to all those different plots,” Zimmerman said. “I don’t think I picked up my computer for three weeks.”

The roof to the research building had been blown off, and trees were leaning on other buildings. After assessing the damage, and locating some tarps to stretch over the missing roof, Zimmerman led a crew out to the forest. His staff, along with some researchers and volunteers, used hand saws and a lot of grunt labor to open the trails to the various study plots. They worked steadily and with a sense of urgency, as a number of the experiments relied on timely data collection. For instance, the staff measures nitrate and potassium levels in the soil water every two weeks, and understanding Maria’s effects on these nutrients was crucial. “It’s samples like that you don’t want to lose the rhythm to in an event like this,” Zimmerman explained.

The most striking thing about the forest in those first days was its new color: brown. If you gazed up at a once verdant hillside, you might think it had been burnt—all the green leaves were gone.

No mature tree, anywhere, can withstand 140-mile-per-hour winds. Along with the leaves, something has to give, and it will be the weakest part of the structure: the roots, the trunk, or the crown. In temperate forests where hurricanes are a rarity—as in much of the mainland United States—most large trees are uprooted because the roots are the weak link. In the tropical forest at El Yunque, the roots held, some of the trunks were snapped, but nearly all of the crowns blew apart. The vast majority of the trees—maybe 95 percent of them—remained upright, even though they’d lost most of their limbs, branches, and leaves. It was as if someone had replaced trees with telephone poles.

During Hurricane Maria, high winds snapped all of the branches off the crowns of trees in the forest, leaving these bottle brush-like trees. Photo courtesy of Stephen Long.

Six months after the hurricane, when I visited Luquillo and walked out into the forest with Zimmerman, the green had returned. The telephone poles had already transformed into bottle brushes—their green leaves growing like bristles from the upper stem. Unlike mainland forests, a tropical forest has no dormant season, so the palm, the tabonuco (known for grafting its roots to those of its neighbors), the ausubo, with deep buttresses at its base, and all the other trees began sprouting branches and putting on leaves almost immediately. The trees had no time to waste, because they continue to respire and the only way to replenish the storeroom of carbohydrates is through photosynthesis—which requires leaves.

Luquillo’s forests are primary forests, which means that they were never cleared for agriculture, unlike most of Puerto Rico’s forests. There has been some sporadic logging, but that ended 70 years ago. So some of the larger ausubos and tabonucos are surely hundreds of years old, though it’s impossible to know, since the lack of a dormant season also means there are no annual tree rings to count.

It’s safe to assume that many of these trees stood through San Felipe II in 1928, the most recent hurricane comparable in strength to Maria. The strategy that has enabled them to survive this long is that they sacrifice their crowns, like sailors reefing their sails when the wind gets too rough. Any species less windfirm has been knocked off the mountain by now. Researchers have shown that selection for hurricane resistance also operates within species. Palms and mahoganies grown from seeds from hurricane-prone areas are more windfirm than those from areas lacking hurricanes.

Even though the greening of the canopy overhead was spectacular, it was no match for what was happening on the ground, where a sea of verdant jade was flooding in around us. Zimmerman pointed out the pioneer tree species soaking up the sun. These species cannot grow in the deep shade of a rainforest, but when a hurricane blows the canopy away, they seize the day. Seeds that were deposited in the soil decades ago—the last time the canopy was wide open—suddenly have enough sunlight to germinate. They do so by the thousands. One of these pioneers, the cecropia, gathers light with a leaf so huge it could function as an umbrella.

After the hurricane removed the dense tree cover that shielded the forest floor, sunlight awakened seeds—some of which had been waiting for decades—and the green understory sprang to life. Photo courtesy of Stephen Long.

“We’re seeing a lot of herbs that we haven’t seen,” Zimmerman said, pointing to a lush heliconia, a wild plantain. “There are huge patches of these heliconia, and they were virtually non-existent before the storm. I’ve seen pokeweed. That’s a pasture plant, not a forest plant. In two or three years there will be tons of shrubs in the understory. This is their time to grow, to flower, and to produce fruit to fill up the seed banks and to wait for the next hurricane. This is their opportunity to go.”

Grasses, vines that completely envelop tree trunks, begonias, tree ferns, all of these plants thriving in the sudden gift of sunlight are turning what was once an open park into a puckerbrush. But they are racing against the clock. This is a very dynamic time at Luquillo. Can any of the new trees grow fast enough to make it to the canopy? Sprouts on residual trees become branches, branches become limbs, and the canopy fills in the gaps. The 30 percent canopy cover of today will return once again to a full canopy, leading to light levels near the ground low enough to make photographers weep. And the live-fast, die-young pioneer species will indeed die young, starved of sunlight, though they will most likely have made plenty of deposits in the seed bank.

The ecological concept of resilience is surprisingly straightforward. It is a measure of how long it takes for a system to return to pre-disturbance conditions after an event like a hurricane. The forests of El Yunque have shown that within 25 years, they can return to pre-hurricane conditions. Only time will tell if Puerto Rico’s political, social, and economic systems will be able to make the kind of recovery that we can expect to see from its treasured rainforest.

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