Which Hurricane is This Again?

On August 25th (25/8/17) Hurricane Harvey blew in from the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall in the US state of Texas.

On September 10th (10/9/17) Hurricane Irma made landfall in the US state of Florida. This followed it tearing through the Caribbean islands as one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded.

Around September 16th (16/9/17) Hurricane Jose made its way through the Caribbean. However unlike Hurricane Irma it turned to the northern Atlantic avoiding significant damage.

The week beginning September 18th (18/9/17) saw the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Alongside the busiest week of the year in global politics it also saw Hurricane Maria follow Irma and Jose's path across the Caribbean.

As a Category 1 hurricane Maria is currently sitting off the US Atlantic coast close to New York City where the UNGA is held.

Mounting relief and recovery efforts in response to any one of these hurricanes is a mammoth task. Having four hurricanes strike roughly the same area in the space of four weeks makes that task even harder.

Complicating matters even further is the geography of where the hurricanes have struck.

The group of Caribbean island affected by the hurricanes are known as the Leeward Islands. This is made up of twelve distinct island territories.

They are governed in a variety of ways with some being independent nation states, others being far flung parts of other nations such as Saint Martin which is considered a French city and others still being semi-independent overseas territories of other nations such as Anguilla.

The territories themselves are often made up of a number of separate islands. The territory of Turks & Caicos is actually made up of some 300 separate islands.

Mounting relief and recovery operations on a single island is always complicated. You need to arrange for everything you need to be delivered from overseas. You also need to arrange for things like rubbish and debris to be removed from the island to be disposed of.

The logistics of trying to simultaneously mount relief and recovery operations across several hundred islands is eye-wateringly complicated.

Any form of relief and recovery operation is a longterm process. Even without the added problems of a widespread natural disaster building a single house takes months if not years of work.

I am currently very heavily involved in the current fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Therefore it is not possible for me to commit in depth to the Caribbean recovery effort. Strictly speaking I don't even have the time to be writing this.

However I do have some experience in natural disaster recovery operations. So I can talk about the topic in some general terms.

The first priority is to make sure that people do not die of thirst. In order to do this you need to provide each person with just 300ml (10floz) of drinking water every three days. It will be better if people divide that up over the three days but you can go for two days without any water.

The second priority is to make sure that people do not die of starvation. In order to do this you need to provide each person with a single meal of around 2,000 calories every six weeks. Again it will be better if people divide that meal over the six weeks but you can survive for six weeks without any food.

In order to meet this basic requirement you need to establish a network of aid stations of distribution points. How you do this really depends on the specifics of where you are operating but generally you need one in every village and every district of a city.

In the aftermath of a natural disaster and particularly when you are operating across a chain of islands many of these aid stations will be inaccessible by road. That means you can't simply load up trucks at the air/sea port and drive them to the aid stations. Instead you need to use helicopters or a combination of trucks and small boats.

Once you've established this network providing the basics you can then start to scale up. That means you start providing everyone with 300ml of drinking water each day rather than every three days and a meal every three weeks rather than six.

At the same time you need to be reestablishing the ways in which people normally access food and water. In short you re-open the shops. If you don't do this you trap people into reliance on aid which leaves them constantly on the brink of another disaster.

Once you've guarded against dehydration and starvation you need to start protecting people from the elements.

The human body doesn't actually need that much protection from the weather. Across the globe there are tens of millions of people living in mud huts and wooden shacks. The problem though is really heat. If people get too cold they will die of hypothermia. If they get too hot they will die of hyperthermia.

In the Caribbean the real threat is from the heat. Whether you combat this with fans, ice or air conditioning you really need electricity to power it.

When it comes to electricity there are really two main challenges; Production and Distribution.

Firstly you need a means of producing electricity in the first place. For the US at least this is actually the easier problem to solve. If need be they can sail an aircraft carrier with its own built in nuclear power plant off the coast of the affected area and use that as a temporary replacement for the power supply.

However that is no good if you lack a distribution network to get that electricity from where it's being produced to people's homes. There is a whole host of things that can go wrong with an electricity distribution network from downed powerlines to fried transformers and they can take an extremely long time to repair.

In the interim you can distribute onsite generators to key locations such as hospitals, command centres and aid stations. If you can get power up at those locations you can turn them into cooling stations which the public can visit for short periods in order to cool down.

The problem with using generators is that they need to be constantly supplied with fuel. Within Climate Change negotiations this has actually been a longterm challenge for particularly small Caribbean island nations.

Big oil companies hand out generators for free creating demand for their gasoline products to fuel them which local governments are forced to meet rather that building a sustainable power grid. This is an issue that former US President Obama's Paris Agreement singularly failed to address.

Particularly amongst the US media much of the attention in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria has been focused on the US Territory of Puerto Rico.

This is not a US state but the people living there are US Citizens. As such the US government has the same responsibility to help them as it does people living in Texas or Florida.

The main problem in Puerto Rico is that its Governor is a member of the US Democrat Party.

In the run-up to Hurricane Harvey striking Texas the US left grew increasingly excited that it could turn into President Trump's Hurricane Katrina. With the Governor of Texas being a Republican that did not happen.

In the run-up to Hurricane Irma striking Florida the US again grew increasingly excited that it this time it could be President Trump's Hurricane Katrina. With the Governor of Florida being a Republican this again did not happen.

With Hurricane Maria striking Democrat-run Puerto Rico the US left now seem to be trying their hardest to make sure it turns into President Trump's Hurricane Katrina.

Within days of Maria striking Puerto Rico the US Federal government had the airports open and was flying in the food and water required to meet everyone's basic needs.

My only cause for concern is that they are flying in bottled water. There is only so much each aircraft can carry and only so many aircraft you can land each day. Therefore rather than using that capacity to transport bottled water it makes more sense to deploy a Navy ship with a water processing plant so you can bottle water onsite.

The US Federal government has also deployed a large number of industrial scale electrical generators. Prior to the hurricane they stock piled large amounts of fuel for those generators on the island.

The problem that exists at the moment seems to be on the local level. There is simply no real network to get that food and water to people via aid stations or to get the fuel from the storage tanks to the generators.

Whatever incompetence planned or otherwise that exists in the Puerto Rico administration distributions are being made worse by a lack of security. There have been a number of incidents of retail gas stations being restocked only for them to be hijacked by local drug gangs.

This insecurity means that local authorities don't want to send out convoys without police or military escorts and local residents don't want to travel to pick up aid without those same escorts.

With it becoming increasingly obvious that Puerto Rico's electricity supply problems are going to go on for quite some time the US has today dispatched a hospital ship. This should simply replace the island's hospitals.

16:55 on 27/9/17 (UK date).

Edited at around 18:50 on 28/9/17 (UK date) to add;

Alongside Puerto Rico the US Federal government also has an obligation to aid those on the US Virgin Islands who have also been affected by Hurricane Maria. As with Puerto Rico the US Virgin Islands are not a US State. However if you are born there you are born as a US Citizen.

However the Governor of the US Virgin Islands is a Republican. So the US media are focusing on Puerto Rico which is run by a Democrat.

Within two to three days of Maria striking Puerto Rico the US Federal government has its main airport open and operating at around one third of its civilian capacity.

What normally happens in situations like this is that the military take over the airports. They then close the airspace to everything except military aid flights. Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake the Canadian military actually had to build an entirely new airfield. A task they managed in just five days.

So the fact that Puerto Rico's main airport is already operating at one third civilian capacity is sign that things are actually going quite well.

The US Federal government has also got Puerto Rico's main seaport at San Juan Bay fully open and operational. It has already taken ashore in excess of 9,500 shipping containers loaded with relief aid.

Those nearly 10,000 shipping containers are currently sitting on the dockside at San Juan port not moving anywhere. This has left the port at almost full capacity and means that further aid ships are being held at ports on the US mainland because there is no space to unload them in Puerto Rico.

The US Democrat Party's response to Maria has been to demand the suspension of the Jones Act. This means that only US registered ships can pick up cargo at one US port and deliver it to another US port.

President Trump has today suspended the Jones Act. However that is a null issue. The problem isn't getting the ships and there are actually ships queued up and waiting. The problem is getting the cargo off the docks so more cargo can be brought ashore.

The bottleneck at San Juan port has been blamed on a lack of fuel. This is not true.

Prior to the hurricane Puerto Rico was fully stocked with in excess of 6.5 million barrels of fuel. 4.3 million of those barrels are currently sitting at the Yabucoa storage facility on the south of the island completely unused.

The 2.2 million barrels of fuel at San Juan are being haphazardly distributed. Three barges are arriving each day to replenish the storage tanks. However as with the cargo those boats are being forced to wait because the tanks are not being emptied.

The main problem with aid distribution is that only around 20% of Puerto Rico's truck drivers have turned up to work.

What the US Federal government could do is send in troops to drive the trucks. Although you need to call people into work, give them time to pack a few things and fly them out this could happen in as little as 24hrs. However for every person you bring in you also need to bring in extra supplies to feed them and provide them with water and shelter.

In the long term it would be better for Puerto Rico if the existing truck drivers simply went back to work and started picking up paychecks to pay to rebuild their own homes and feed their families.

The reason why those truck drivers aren't turning up to work seems to be twofold.

Firstly they simply might not be able to. Large sections of the island remain inaccessible by road largely due to landslides blocking roads. Also while there is plenty of fuel on the island it is not getting out to the public. Therefore many of these truck drivers can't drive into work in the first place.

The obvious solution would be to put on transport for them. Simply send shuttle buses to pick them up from their homes.

The second problem is that the security situation is bad. As a result people don't want to leave their families alone and unguarded while the go off to work and potentially have to sleep at their depots.

The security situation is harder to solve. However it seems based more on isolated incidents driving a perception of fear rather then widespread looting and violence. Ultimately those drivers could be forced into work.

Today President Trump has appointed Lt General Jeffery Buchanan of the US Army to takeover logistics on Puerto Rico.

That seems to be a polite way of saying the Governor Ricardo Rossello is about to be seeking alternative employment.

19:25 on 28/9/17 (UK date).