Socioeconomic Vulnerability and Hurricane-Related Outages: Evidence from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico

Abstract

Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017 as a Category 4 storm and caused Puerto Rico’s entire energy grid to fail, leading to the longest blackout in American history. The storm damaged critical infrastructure and reduced households’ access to food, water, and medical care. Several studies of Maria find a significant, positive relationship between outage duration and several measures of social vulnerability. Formulating the proper policy response to address this inequality requires identifying the underlying causes, and recent studies of the Southeast United States suggest recovery procedures themselves contribute. In this paper, I apply spatial regression methods to data from power recovery crew deployments following Hurricane Maria and find, conditional on the impact of the storm itself, a significant, positive relationship between outage duration and socioeconomic vulnerability, but no statistically-significant relationship between two other forms of social vulnerability and outage duration, namely vulnerability defined by the quality of available housing and transportation and by household composition (e.g., 65+ population). This is consistent with recent studies of the American Southeast but contradicts another recent study of Maria which relies on the same data but uses methods ill-suited for the empirical setting. In addition to this primary analysis and unique to this paper, I obtain geospatial data on Puerto Rican infrastructure to explore alternative spatial weight matrices and test for potential biases caused by standard weighting practices in the literature. I find no evidence of such biases.