Hurricane Maria crossed Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, as a strong Category 4.
The wind and rain damaged buildings, but the defining catastrophe was what came after: the island’s power grid failed almost entirely, and some residents went nearly a year without electricity.
An independent mortality study later estimated the storm’s true death toll at approximately 2,975 — the great majority from the collapse of medical, water, and power systems in the months afterward, not the storm itself.
Maria is the clearest case on file in the Storm Council Strike Systems, Not Structures principle.
The buildings that stood were not the measure of what the storm did. The catastrophic loss that resulted from the power grid going down was.
The Storm Council’s discipline is to keep counting after the wind stops, because the the system failures a storm exposes often cause more damage over a lifetime than the storm caused in the days and weeks after.
The Council’s judgment only gets sharper with more entries. Follow along as the Record grows.