Puerto Rico Still in Emergency Mode

Being the third hurricane in less than two months is never a good position to be in, especially when you are an island. Thus we watch as tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans continue to leave the island for the United States mainland. See this 60 Minutes segment on Puerto Rico.

In a disaster like an airplane crash or ship sinking, there is never one single element that caused the disaster. Typically there are multiple contributing factors to things going tragically wrong. For instance, at Three Mile Island, the control room kept trying the wrong solution to fix the wrong problem.

For Puerto Rico, there are many elements that I've written about before:

• Deferred maintenance of the electrical grid
• The problem of logistics in disaster response
• A lack of planning and preparedness
• The "worst-case event" happening
• The population being impacted and not available for work
• Electrical power being the Achilles heel of the 21st-century economy
• Transportation challenges impacting everything else
• The timing of the disaster

Any one of the above could be challenging, but collectively taken together, plus more not listed, it is going to be a long hard pull to bring Puerto Rico back from the brink.