Full NDWE maps of power recovery across Puerto Rico are available on the public NASA Disasters Data Portal ( ).įunding: M.O.R, E.C.S, Z.W, V.K, and R.S. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.
This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose.
Received: FebruAccepted: JPublished: June 28, 2019 PLoS ONE 14(6):Įditor: Joe McFadden, University of California Santa Barbara, UNITED STATES (2019) Satellite-based assessment of electricity restoration efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. The approach developed in this study demonstrates the potential of satellite-based estimates of power recovery to improve the real-time monitoring of disaster impacts, globally, at a spatial resolution that is actionable for the disaster response community.Ĭitation: Román MO, Stokes EC, Shrestha R, Wang Z, Schultz L, Carlo EAS, et al. For many urban areas, poor residents, the most vulnerable to increased mortality and morbidity risks from power losses, shouldered the longest outages because they lived in less dense, detached housing where electricity restoration lagged. Unexpectedly, we also identify large disparities in electricity recovery between neighborhoods within the same urban area, based primarily on the density of housing. 29% of urban municipalities), and in the northern and eastern districts. During the recovery, a disproportionate share of long-duration power failures (> 120 days) occurred in rural municipalities (41% of rural municipalities vs. Our results show an 80% decrease in lights, in total, immediately after Hurricane Maria. Within all of the island’s settlements, we track outages and recovery times, and link these measures to census-based demographic characteristics of residents. We apply the methodology in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, which caused the longest blackout in US history. In contrast to existing utility data, these estimates are independent, open, and publicly-available, consistently measured across regions that may be serviced by several different power companies, and inclusive of distributed power supply (off-grid systems). Here, we develop an approach for using daily satellite nighttime lights data to create spatially disaggregated power outage estimates, tracking electricity restoration efforts after disasters strike. A real-time understanding of the distribution and duration of power outages after a major disaster is a precursor to minimizing their harmful consequences.