Los chavos de María

As Puerto Rico prepares to host the World Baseball Classic in March 2026, many communities across the archipelago are still waiting for the parks where children and teenagers play the sport to be brought back into shape.

Eight years after the hurricane, Gov. Jenniffer González’s administration insists on maintaining the same emergency protocol for electricity-dependent patients that failed under the past three administrations.

The fund expired in June. Originally approved by the Legislature in 2020 to provide municipalities with liquidity, the reserve ultimately failed to deliver. Jenniffer González now plans to redirect it toward energy projects that could benefit “other entities,” not just government agencies.

COR3, the agency in charge of recovery in Puerto Rico, holds FEMA responsible for excluding that multi-million-dollar expense because of the methodology it used to estimate the damage to the electrical system after Hurricanes Irma and María.

The absence of clear guidelines from the Puerto Rico Department of Housing to execute the program and poor advice from US firms hired for millions of dollars results in the delay in City Revitalization Program projects.

Of the 242 community aqueduct systems legally registered in Puerto Rico as franchises, 31% have not requested recovery funds for the damages caused to infrastructure by Hurricanes Irma and María in September 2017, according to data from the Government’s Central Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency (COR3). Although the reasons are different for each community […]

Fourteen of the 42 monitors that the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA, in Spanish) used to measure air pollutants harmful to health throughout Puerto Rico are out of service, some for as long as five years, a Center for Investigative Journalism investigation found.

The area in the switchyard where the Central Costa Sur fire occurred, which caused the general blackout last Wednesday, should have been renovated four months ago, in December 2021, according to the original infrastructure plan through which the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) will access $10.7 billion in federal recovery funds. But, after LUMA’s […]

The Department of Health, responsible for inspecting and approving the emergency evacuation plans of all the island’s hospitals, only keeps them for the three hospitals that it runs. The agency’s Deputy Secretary’s Office for the Regulation and Accreditation of Health Facilities (SARAFS, in Spanish) does not keep a copy of the evacuation plans that it […]

Many of the mothers of femicide victims ignore their own trauma and loss to take care of the grandchildren who were orphaned by sexist violence.

María Pérez-Ramos never imagined that the land ceded by the former mayor of Canovanas, José “Chemo” Soto, in the San Isidro community 19 years ago, was flood-prone. Had she known, she would not have accepted it, she said. Now, all she wants is to move to a safe place where she doesn’t have to be […]

Although the University of Puerto Rico’s (UPR) administration has been given notice to avoid further structural damages in its campuses in case of earthquakes, the President of the institution, Jorge Haddock, acknowledges that there is no plan or a cost estimate to fix the flaws, which due to lack of maintenance and old construction defects, […]

It took Yahaira Santiago two years to fix the roof that Hurricane María ripped off her home at the La Playa de Ponce sector in the South coast. She had returned home only a few weeks before, when the Jan. 7 earthquake opened the earth in her backyard and left the structure unlivable once again. […]

When Pamela H. Patenaude announced her departure as undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Dec. 17, 2018, former Secretary of the Puerto Rico Housing Department, Fernando Gil-Enseñat, and several local officials publicly lamented it. Patenaude, who was second in command after Secretary Ben Carson, was an important ally of […]

Keeping track of the federal funds for recovery projects that are being granted by the Government of Puerto Rico is an impossible mission. There is no centralized place for all those contracts and, although there are some scattered on the webpages of the Central Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, known as COR3, the Department […]