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Puerto Rico’s Environmental Crisis

Puerto Rico is facing a large-scale environmental crisis, and the government needs to make many more resources available as quickly as possible.

Hurricane Maria’s destruction of infrastructure included significant damage to many of the island’s sewage treatment plants, and the results are appalling:

Raw sewage is pouring into the rivers and reservoirs of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. People without running water bathe and wash their clothes in contaminated streams, and some islanders have been drinking water from condemned wells.

Nearly a month after the hurricane made landfall, Puerto Rico is only beginning to come to grips with a massive environmental emergency that has no clear end in sight.

“I think this will be the most challenging environmental response after a hurricane that our country has ever seen,” said Judith Enck, who served as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency region that includes Puerto Rico under President Barack Obama.

Almost a third of the people on the island remain without access to potable water, and these are the sources that hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to use. In some rural areas, even previously reliable natural water sources have become contaminated by the bodies of animals killed by the storm. The contamination of all these water sources means that outbreaks of disease are likely to follow.

The immediate and long-term effects on public health could be severe, and the scale of the problem is huge:

With hundreds of thousands of people still without running water, and 20 of the island’s 51 sewage treatment plants out of service, there are growing concerns about contamination and disease.

“People in the U.S. can’t comprehend the scale and scope of what’s needed,” said Drew Koslow, an ecologist with the nonprofit Ridge to Reefs who recently spent a week in Puerto Rico working with a portable water treatment system.

Puerto Rico is facing a large-scale environmental crisis, and the government needs to make many more resources available as quickly as possible. Most of the island remains without power, so pumping stations have to run off of generators that require fuel. There should be an urgent effort to get all undamaged pumping stations up and running, and repairing damaged treatment plants should be a top priority as part of the government’s response. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands need clean drinking water and aren’t getting it. It is simply unacceptable that this many people in Puerto Rico still don’t have access to drinking water almost a month after the hurricane.

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