By late last weekend the residents of Dominica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republican and a whole host of smaller nations knew what they were about to endure. Hurricane Maria was fast bearing down on them. It's the second storm of this Atlantic hurricane season to reach Category 5 status on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Maria made landfall on Dominica at full strength and the extent of the damage is still being gauged. Aerial footage from Wednesday shows an island sheared of vegetation; crops and trees wrenched from the earth. The storm, like Irma before it, toppled powerlines, smashed boats in the marina and tore the roofs of houses.
15 people have been confirmed dead and as of Friday another 20 were missing. For a good portion of the week the islands residents were left to fend for themselves; cut off from their neighbours by the churning wet mass of Maria.
Puerto Rico suffered a similar fate as it was raked by 175mph winds. A direct hit from Maria
wiped out the utilities and upended the island. Cell towers and the electrical grid were crushed by the staggering volume of water dumped on the island. There is no power, water or phone coverage in many places. Rescue teams are forced to navigate the streets by boat after some suburbs received up to 3ft of rainfall. The United States will have to dig deep to repair its dependent territory as the governor described scenes of
total devastation. For now Puerto Ricans must overcome the second-order effects of the disaster: mudslides, polluted water sources, disease and building collapses.
As Maria batters Haiti and the Dominican Republic an extraordinary and worrying prediction has been made: recovery and reconstruction efforts in the region will be
just as slow and piecemeal as the 2010 Haiti earthquake response. Why? Because inequality and underdevelopment in the Caribbean are not random phenomena, they are the results of colonial power structures that persist to this day.
Mexico is no stranger to earthquakes: it lies across or adjacent to six jostling tectonic plates. On the 19th of September 1985 an earthquake shook the country to its core, smashing hundreds of buildings and leaving 10,000 dead. The ancient lake bed on which the capital lies is particularly prone to friction from the fault zones. On Tuesday morning Mexico held an earthquake drill and commemoration of that quake. All across the country people marched into open areas, took shelter and practiced evacuations. None could have realised just how useful those exercises would become.
Just hours later a
7.1 magnitude earthquake violently shook the country for 20 seconds. It was so intense that older and less-secure buildings in the capital collapsed immediately. Huge plumes of mortar dust rose into the sky above the Mexico City. Gas leaks and fires hampered initial rescue efforts, as did delayed collapses. Further south towards the epicentre, entire towns were flattened.
The death toll stands at 273 but is expected to rise, as always, when emergency workers reach rural areas. At least 2,000 more have been injured. The scale of the disaster has been overwhelming. The Enrique Rebsamen school collapsed in on itself, killing 25 children and teachers. Just 11 young girls were pulled from the wreckage. In step with the severity of the earthquake, the local and international aid response has been enormous. Thousands upon thousands of volunteers worked day and night to clear rubble, and among the survivors they've found reasons to hope.
This earthquake comes on the heels of a larger one earlier this month in the south that killed 100 people.
