Resilience Roundtable: Ivis Garcia Zambrana, AICP, PhD

Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017.
Maria, the more destructive of the two, devastated the island in
myriad ways. It wiped out Puerto Rico's electrical grid, leaving
3 million people without power — the biggest outage in U.S.
history. It caused $100 billion in damage, and recent estimates
from Harvard University, published in the New England Journal of
Medicine, put the number of fatalities at 2,975.


After the disaster, Professor Ivis Garcia Zambrana, AICP, PhD,
went back to the island she grew up on to help create long-term
planning partnerships that would lead to a more resilient Puerto
Rico. In this episode of Resilience Roundtable, she sits down
with host Jim Schwab, FAICP, to provide a context for how
vulnerable Puerto Rico was before the storms: its government was
more than $70 billion in debt and its failing electrical grid was
already causing blackouts. Garcia Zambrana details the aftermath
of the storm, but she also tells Schwab about the planning work
that happened — and continues to happen — post-Maria. Several
plans were culled into one, and a fiscal plan was put together.
The two planners discuss the positive developments happening on
the ground, such as how the community resilience program
strengthens towns by granting funds to local planning
organizations, but also where work still needs to be done to get
into step with the new economic and disaster recovery plan. Their
nuanced discussion paints a portrait of a complex situation: one
in which great strides in rebuilding and recovery have been made,
but great strides in hazard mitigation still need to happen.