Abstract
On the morning of Wednesday, September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall near the southeastern town of Yabucoa, Puerto Rico (PR), as a powerful Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. Hurricane Maria moved diagonally across the island with sustained winds of 249 km/h and is considered the worst storm to hit PR in over 80 years. Hurricane Maria arrived only two weeks after Hurricane Irma; this prior hurricane had passed just north of the island, ensuing heavy rainfall throughout the island, and leaving about one million residents without power. The scale of Hurricane Maria’s destruction was even more devastating, causing as much as $95 billion in damages. Electricity was cut off for 100% of the island, and most residents suffered from limited access to clean water and food. Puerto Rico’s power outage was, by far, the most severe in United States history in terms of total customer-hours lost.
This paper describes the event timeline and summarizes reconnaissance observations by the authors as part of an NSF RAPID project to document the infrastructure damages of the power grid in PR. Extreme natural disasters associated with climate change have increased in frequency in recent years, resulting in significant impacts on local economies and drastic increases in global disaster expenditures. Many of these climate events, including wind storms, ice storms, hurricanes, floods, landslides, and tornadoes, are directly affecting the people, infrastructure, economies, and the natural environment. A storm effect correlation analysis was performed on a 10 km × 10 km grid on the island and the most damaging storm effect is identified. The field information and data presented in this paper provide insight to help the engineering community adapt and improve design and construction practices to improve resiliency of our infrastructure and lifelines.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the funding received under NSF Grant CMMI-1807813 (NSF Program Director Dr. Anthony Kuh). The research team would also like to extend their gratitude and appreciation to PREPA for supporting this project through access to critical data of power grid responses during Hurricane Maria. In particular, the team would like to acknowledge the help from engineers Efran Paredes, Mireya Rodriguez, Camille Ocasio and Luderis Berrios.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily, reflect the views of the NSF or PREPA.
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Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available in a repository online in accordance with funder data retention policies (http://cybergis.uncc.edu/hurricane).
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Chen, SE., Pando, M.A., Irizarry, A.A., Baez-Rivera, Y., Tang, W., Ng, Y. (2021). Resiliency of Power Grid Infrastructure Under Extreme Hazards - Observations and Lessons Learned from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. In: Neves, J., Zhu, B., Rahardjo, P. (eds) Advanced Geotechnical and Structural Engineering in the Design and Performance of Sustainable Civil Infrastructures. GeoChina 2021. Sustainable Civil Infrastructures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80155-7_1
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