Shelter from the storm

Sammanfattning: Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on the 20th of September 2017. It was a category four hurricane with winds of up to 175mph. It was the strongest hurricane to hit the island since Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and said to be the worst natural disaster ever to hit the Caribbean Islands. Officials stated that the hurricane killed 64 people; however, the death toll was later revealed to actually have been 2,975 by a study done by researchers at George Washington University (Barclay, 2018). The hurricane created the largest blackout in US history and the second-largest globally, with 3.4 million citizens without electricity. In a country that already had poor infrastructure before Maria, 80% of the power lines were knocked down. It took 328 days before power was restored to the whole island. The 44% of the Puerto Rican population living in poverty were hit the hardest. Remote and rural villages became utterly cut off from services for months as roads were destroyed by the storm.