![]() Low-income neighborhoods with low density housing, those that were the least able to cope with the financial and health impacts of electricity losses, suffered the longest outages. The data also identified large disparities in electricity recovery between neighborhoods within the same urban area. The maps created from Black Marble over Puerto Rico showed an 80% decrease in lights, in total, immediately after Hurricane Maria for the entirety of Puerto Rico, with the longest power failures occurring in rural municipalities. The Black Marble Product Suite is a novel satellite product with the capability of tracking power outages and power restoration at the street-level, both within cities and in remote and isolated areas that may be difficult to reach. To map areas that were hit hardest and to track the recovery of the grid, EfSI scientists used satellite technology, called the Black Marble, to measure changes in night lighting before the storm, and during days post-Maria. However, in the case of Hurricane Maria, little information was available from PREPA, Puerto Rico’s sole power utility, due to disruption in monitoring systems. Historically, data provided by utilities have been the sole source of outage information for response operations. During the storm, sustained winds of 155 mph caused 1.5 million grid-connected customers across the island to suffer from long duration power failures. Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017. These validated results of the storm can also be used as an input for other analysis such as hydrological models to geo-locate regions for risks due to flooding.When power utilities’ monitoring services are disrupted during a hurricane, novel satellite technology comes to the rescue As an example of damage assessment, the risk of failure of the electrical power towers as a function of wind speed and soil saturation is simulated using statistical models for the entire Island, which results in higher risks of failure at the Northwest and center of the Island. The orographic effects are simulated, reflecting enhancement of the rainfall at high altitudes in the central mountains of the Island. The total rainfall for the event was simulated to peak at 762 mm (observed 965 mm) at the center of the Island and was validated with post-hurricane National Weather Service (NWS) rainfall with a Normalized Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.2. Simulated (WRF) time series of wind speed is in close resemblance compared with the limited data available from ocean buoys with a simulated and observed peak wind speed of 30 m/s on the southern coast of the Island. The synoptic observational record shows that the monthly average Sea Surface Temperature of 30 ☌, with an anomaly of 0.5 ☌ as well as low vertical wind shear of 4–8 m/s fueled H-Maria. The aim of this work is to fill the gap of the hydro-meteorological processes of this relevant storm due to the limited observational data available. ![]() Besides, H-Maria left a lasting impact on the Island as it brought to full collapse the electrical power grid rendering the Island entirely out of power for more than ten months. ![]() ![]() ![]() The human loss due to Hurricane Maria (H-Maria) in the month of September of 2017 was quantified to be more than 4500 casualties in the entire island of Puerto Rico, making it the most devastating storm in US history. ![]()
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