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“Natural disasters don’t kill people, governments kill people:” hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico–recreancy, and ‘risk society’

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Abstract

On September 20, 2017, Maria, the eleventh-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded, made landfall at 6:15 am local time, the second category 5 hurricane to strike the island in as many weeks. What followed was one of the most challenging recovery situations since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005. Using 402 newspaper articles from The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, I performed a deductive and inductive analysis of print news media frames to demonstrate the complex ways in which the discourse and actions of key social agents and institutions shape disaster risk for the archipelago before, during, and after Maria. Findings suggest media framing facilitated a lack of accountability for key institutions obliged to provide response and recovery. Key powerful actors, including President Donald Trump, shifted blame for the disaster from FEMA and other key institutions to Puerto Rico, effectively protecting the legitimacy of the Trump administration and its response in Puerto Rico. I argue that these processes are owed to economic factors. Here, Beck’s concept of an institutionally dependent “industrial society” is reconstituted in economically vital urban centers. In contrast, the failure of key institutions causes rural spaces to abandon them. This individualization of risk marks what Beck refers to as the emergence into a “risk society.” This article offers important implications for the study of media as a key site for the selective preservation of institutional legitimacy during disasters and the particular and contingent development of a risk society.

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Notes

  1. A host of disaster literature focuses on myths perpetrated by the media and effects that those have on response and recovery (for examples see Tierney 2003, 2014; Tierney et al. 2006; Houston et al. 2012; Monahan and Ettinger 2018). While incredibly important, for the purposes of this article I am narrowing my focus specifically to how institutional responsibility and recreancy is framed before, during, and after disasters.

  2. At this point, it is important to acknowledge the discrepancy between the two newspapers in regard to their distribution of coverage dedicated to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. In the final six months of data collection the Wall Street Journal only contributed a single article to the sample, while the New York Times contributed twenty-three (Nov 2018–April 8, 2018). This suggests that the Wall Street Journal tired of the story in Puerto Rico long before their counterpart which should, in part, explain the discrepancy between the raw data and the need for systematic sampling.

  3. Editorials were included in the sample for two reasons: to expand the size of the sample and to include broader public discourse beyond news reporting.

  4. (Robles—NYT 2018).

  5. Mazzei and Armendariz—NYT (2018).

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  1. Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

    Adam M. Straub

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Straub, A.M. “Natural disasters don’t kill people, governments kill people:” hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico–recreancy, and ‘risk society’. Nat Hazards 105, 1603–1621 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04368-z

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