One Year After Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico is Not Safe

San Juan, P.R. -- Tomorrow, September 20th, marks one year since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, eventually taking nearly three thousand lives.

In response, Jose Menendez, Chapter Chair for Sierra Club de Puerto Rico, issued the following statement:

“On September 20th, the world will remember that Puerto Rico exists again. On the 22nd we’ll march in San Juan, in Washington D.C. and in Mar-A-Lago Florida  where so many Boricuas have been driven by displacement. We will march and hope that the world hears our message, because we have a hard truth to share: Puerto Rico is merely one of the first communities to experience so many deaths and so much hardship due to the impacts of climate change. We will not be the last.

“Without a reliable clean energy grid, Puerto Rico is not safe from the impacts of climate change. Every day thousands of people on the island lose access to power as our unreliable, decrepit grid flickers on and off. Imagine what will happen during the next hurricane. Just like when Maria and Irma hit, our hospitals will go dark and vulnerable people will die for lack of access to basic health care like oxygen and dialysis. I write this from San Juan, where we just regained power after an outage from Tropical Storm Isaac. But hurricane season is just beginning. Now, and perhaps forever, our lives depend upon an electric grid more fragile and unreliable than any other in the United States. Until Puerto Rico builds a reliable, distributed clean energy grid that actually works for our mountainous island, millions of lives will be at risk every hurricane season.”