Puerto Rico’s Power Grid Failure Is Causing A Public Health Crisis Of Epic Proportions

Dr. Trivino must use sunlight to examine x-rays since electricity is sporadic in Puerto Rico.

 

One month after the devastating Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc on the island of Puerto Rico, the territory is still facing a public health crisis.  And it’s a crisis of epic proportions.

On Friday, former Puerto Rican Governor Alejandro García Padilla tweeted a photo from inside a hospital, in which scrubbed-up doctors leaned over an operating table performing surgery lit only by a flashlight. According to Slate, the image quickly made the rounds on the internet; it currently has almost 9,000 retweets and many speculate that that’s probably because the blurry picture feels like it’s worth a good deal more than 1,000 words.  It illuminates just a small sliver of the public health crisis Puerto Rico is currently facing.

This is what POTUS calls a 10! Surgery performed with cellphones as flashlights in Puerto Rico today. pic.twitter.com/5pnK5dkkE6

— Alejandro (@agarciapadilla) October 21, 2017

Millions of residents still don’t have access to electricity or proper health care, and bacteria in the water have exposed many people to disease. And calls for help have gone unanswered besides the few willing to travel to the devastated island privately. Senator  Martin Heinrich (D-NM) along with a handful of other lawmakers are calling on the federal government to continue to provide aid to the post-apocalyptic ravaged territory. 

“Even before Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit the U.S. territories, the islands’ health care system was suffering from the ongoing economic crisis. The islands are grappling with physician shortages, Medicaid programs facing an impending funding cliff, and widespread disparities in Federal health programs—and that was before hurricane season,” the lawmakers stated in a letter. “We are grateful for the public health emergency declaration in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but more can and should be done to help Americans impacted by these disasters.”

The senators stressed that much of the islands’ power and communication networks are out and, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), it will take months before power is fully restored. Hospitals have been forced to prioritize patients, ration services, and forgo elective surgeries.  The power grid’s failure has caused more problems than many anticipated, like the stall of relief efforts.  Without electricity, communications are non-existent too.

Some 33 days after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, only 23 percent of residents have electricity, according to Status.pr, which provides daily updates on basic services on the island. While there are still other problems as well, such as gas stations being slow to reopen, and roads getting badly damaged, the power grid’s utter annihilation in the category 4 winds is not just a temporary inconvenience. The different ways that the lack of electricity can set off a cascade of other crises is becoming increasingly clear.

A giant government-owned hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, arrived in Puerto Rico weeks ago to help out, but many people don’t know about the ship. Without electricity, most cell phone towers are down.  But even if communications were working, residents can’t get to the port, as many of the island’s roads are impassable and most are without gasoline to power a car. The ship has extensive space and equipment for trauma care and a large staff, but CNN reported that as of last Tuesday, only 33 of 250 beds were full.

The looming crisis seems to be getting worse, not better, and Puerto Rico is experiencing a medical crisis of epic proportions.

Puerto Rico’s Looming Medical Crisis Is About To Explode

It has been one week since Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico. And inside hospitals and clinics, doctors have limited supplies and will soon run out of diesel to power the buildings.

The looming medical crisis is set to explode at any time. Dr. María Rodríguez is the medical director of Concilio de Salud Integral de Loíza, a community health center in a small town in the northeastern portion of Puerto Rico.  She told CNN that she only has six hours of diesel left. Fuel distribution has been inconsistent and there just isn’t enough. Once Dr. Rodríguez is out of fuel, she will have no choice but to close her doors.

With the fuel and power shortages, she expects the top health concern in the days ahead will be infectious diseases. As people who need medications do not get them, she predicts mental health issues will become a problem as well.  “The desperation that all these people have, they’ve lost everything — on the whole island,” she says.

“What else we can do?” she asks. “I haven’t seen anything like this.” For 24 years, she’s worked at the center, which serves about 15,000 underprivileged patients each year. Despite the possibility of a power outage, she and her co-workers are still trying to provide services to the best of their ability. In normal conditions, the center provides everything from primary care and pharmacy services to X-rays. “We can do some things. I have a stethoscope and the antiseptics and I can prescribe. But the pharmacy can’t work with that, they need the system — they need labs to provide medications to these patients,” Rodríguez says.

“It will get worse before it gets better,” she says. Her feelings are shared by other health care providers on the island as well, who believe a medical crisis is about to unfold. Dr. Robert Fuller, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Connecticut and International Medical Corp. arrived in Puerto Rico to help those whose lives are on the line.

“I didn’t realize it was gonna be corner-to-corner everybody affected by the storm,” says Fuller, squinting into the sunlight. “Every family’s been touched and disturbed in some way or another. And the degree of destruction — the power the storm had — took me by surprise.” Communities are disabled by the storm, he says, yet it’s fuel and electricity that are driving this disruption.

“If we had good logistics and good communications, things could probably settle out a little faster,” Fuller says. However, the lack of those things could lead to a medical problem, since medications might not be delivered where needed. Puerto Rico is a “complicated mess” right now, he says. –CNN

It’s not a matter of human resources, says Dr. Fuller. “It’s a matter of getting the medications and treatments to the people.” It’s also a matter of being able to move around and get services to people, which cannot happen without fuel. Unless medical supplies and fuel to run clinics and hospitals can get to the devastated island, and soon, the looming medical crisis will explode, and it could cost some their lives.