How social science can lead the way toward better disaster preparation and recovery

About two-thirds of Puerto Rico’s population had already lost power during Hurricane Irma when Hurricane Maria landed in September of 2017, shutting down power across the rest of the island.

Seeing the devastation caused by the storm and the conditions resulting from loss of electricity, Fernando Tormos-Aponte, an assistant professor of sociology in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, knew he had to act.

Despite his first instinct to head to his homeland and help with the recovery effort, he knew it didn’t align with his skill set. “I had to have a frank reflection and identify how I was poised to help,” Tormos-Aponte said. “It came down to: I’m a social scientist. So how can I help in that way?” 

He did what he knows best. Tormos-Aponte has spent a considerable part of his career understanding the connections between the environment and civil society. After Hurricane Maria, he began to gather and analyze data needed to clearly illustrate which communities are most exposed to the burdens of power loss before, during and after natural disasters. He wanted to be able to present decision-makers with the information they needed to guide more effective, equitable disaster preparedness as well as response strategies that would protect the most vulnerable.

He built a team of social scientists, engineers, data scientists and computer scientists and got to work analyzing large datasets by hand, learning about power distribution and management, and even developing a long-term partnership with the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. “I have dedicated my work since 2017 to trying to leverage the tools that social science gives us to address these social problems.”

On Sept. 17, nine years later, at the inauguration of NASA’s Earth Information Center in Puerto Rico, Tormos-Aponte showed that social science — with support from a wide variety of disciplines — can play a role in disaster preparedness and recovery in Puerto Rico, or anywhere in the world.

Power dynamics

Tormos-Aponte’s relationship with NASA began as he was analyzing data about where and when crews were being deployed to restore power after Maria. He’d heard community concerns about delays in the recovery, but he needed data if he wanted to have a policy-level impact on emergency response.

While he and his colleagues were digging through utility company records to determine if power was being restored in an balanced way, he read a study in which the author used NASA imagery to identify where and when power outages occurred during the course of the storm.

“They used satellite images that identified the very inequalities I was interested in identifying,” he said. The images were taken as part of a NASA program called Black Marble nighttime lights, a collection of satellite images of Earth taken at night.

Together, the datasets from that study and Tormos-Aponte’s team told two sides of the same story: From service records, he could see who was getting power restoration crews first, while the NASA imagery showed recurring dark spots — or blackouts — in some areas well before Maria.

“What we're finding is that there was a pre-hurricane decline in the energy infrastructure,” Tormos-Aponte said. Unlike earlier data analyses that relied on countywide data, “we were able to pinpoint these at the community level, at the neighborhood level,” he added.

Looking ahead

Alongside data related to Maria, the team made some new findings that show the resilience people display when faced with disaster and may help officials rethink disaster preparedness and response.

“In the course of this work, we learned that Puerto Rico is becoming a global leader in rooftop solar adoption,” he said. “More than 3,000 rooftop solar systems are installed per month.”

Although the trend is a response to an unreliable infrastructure and its devastating effects, the use of these systems will do more than save lives — the utility also provides a generous buy-back program, which pays residents for their surplus electricity.

In the field of disasters, population density is typically considered to be a vulnerability because it makes evacuations and rescue operations more difficult. But Tormos-Aponte and his team found the situation is more nuanced when it comes to power outages.

“Utilities want to maximize the number of customers they can restore power to in a single deployment,” Tormos-Aponte said, “and they prioritize critical infrastructure such as hospitals,” which points to quicker recovery times for dense, urban areas and longer wait times for more rural communities.

So long, in fact, that nearly a decade on, some places never quite recovered. “Some places lost their brilliance in terms of their nighttime nightlight, their luminosity,” he said. “They lost it in ways that never came back.”

Tormos-Aponte is working to ensure going forward, no matter what community someone lives in, they won’t have to worry about being left in the dark. His team’s data show, with precision, who is most at risk.

“We’re putting a face to what has been too dominated by numbers,” he said. “Numbers matter because they tell us where we need to look, but we also needed to put a face to who’s being impacted, and that’s part of what our project will be able to do.”

Photography by Aimee Obidzinski