Now, last but certainly not least, is Jennifer Santos-Hernandez.
Jennifer has had a little bit of a – a bit of drama going on in the –
behind the scenes. She’s had her power cut, and then
it’s come back on again now. I think, Jennifer, are you –
are you fully online now again? - Absolutely. [laughs]
- Great. So I will just … - [inaudible]
- I will just briefly introduce Jennifer. Jennifer is a research professor
in sociology in disasters at the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales.
I hope I did that okay, Jennifer. - [inaudible]
- For the Center for Social Research at University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras.
Was that okay?
[laughs] Yeah, thank you. [laughs]
So, Jennifer has – so that center was established in 1945.
It is the oldest social science research center in Puerto Rico.
Jennifer is also an alumna of the Disaster Research Center at the
University of Delaware, where she completed her master’s
and Ph.D. in sociology. She has – she’s on many committees.
She’s working incredibly hard right now.
Just a quick note with Jennifer. When I was deployed to Puerto Rico,
I knew I didn’t understand the cultural context and I needed to phone a friend,
and that friend was Jennifer. And Jennifer spent many hours
with me at the FEMA emergency operations center working through
tricky communication issues and helping me and the rest of
the team really understand what needed to be done.
In fact, she named the southwestern Puerto Rico sequence.
We have much to thank Jennifer for. And just one final note.
As a social scientist, even before I met Jennifer, Jennifer is the
kind of researcher that gets disaster social scientists excited.
When we see an article coming out from Jennifer, we know it’s going to
be amazing and great work. She is one of the thought leaders in my field.
So it is such an honor to be able to have her here today.
Thank you so much, Jennifer.
- Thanks to you, Sara. I very much appreciate your introduction.
So a bit of pretty much how I engaged with Sara and the rest of the team
and pretty much what I was doing when the earthquake happened.
As Sara said, I’m a disaster researcher. I work at Centro de Investigaciones
Sociales at UPR-Río Piedras. And there I pretty much – what I do,
it’s all research and just generating training opportunities for
undergraduates and for graduate students in social sciences.
So, when the 2020 earthquake happened, we have to also think about
the larger context of Puerto Rico and what has been going on
over the last 15 years, pretty much. So, when we talk about risk
communication, and we look at the risk communication literature and
the different models that are available, one of the things that comes across
is the complexity of looking at risk communication in Puerto Rico and
how people make actions in terms of how to protect themselves,
their property, and others. There are other broader challenges
that we have to understand. Puerto Rico has been in an economic
crisis pretty much since 2006. There are historical issues of
unemployment and underemployment that have – that have become paramount
in the last few years when pretty much, ever since we began with the last streak
of hazards that we’ve been dealing in 2017, right before that,
the discussion was pretty much about the elimination of public services
and the reduction of work hours for public employees.
There was – we’ve been dealing with over a decade of a very strong
population loss, which has exacerbated the issue of aging.
We have an aging population, but as we lose more people in their
productive years, that issue becomes more important.
And we’re particularly talking about not just an issue of age, but an issue
of access and an issue of isolation that becomes very much a challenge
in the aftermath of disasters. We’re also talking about
a context of circular migration. One of the things that we observed
when we were doing quick-response research after the earthquakes was that
several people who we talked to at the shelters had just returned to the
island after pretty much moving to the mainland to work, make money,
to rebuild their homes. Some of them had the homes that they
were building at the time also destroyed. We’re also talking about critical
infrastructure in the context of communities that is also disappearing.
And that’s particularly related to the closure of schools.
That process was not necessarily managed taking into consideration
issues of social vulnerability, issues of poverty, issues of children
living with grandparents. So many of the schools that are closing
were also the only government service, or the only government public
infrastructure, that was available in many of these communities.
There’s also the other issue of schools that were certified as shelters destroyed.
That’s precisely the case of Indios in Guayanilla, which is one of the
communities in which we’re working right now, the school is closed,
but it was also their shelter, and it was destroyed by the earthquakes.
So there’s challenges also in terms of access to education.
In terms of broader public health situations, we’ve lost a number of
health professionals because of the economic crisis, and although there
have been incentives to try to retain some of those professionals, access
to specialists in Puerto Rico can be very limited and very cumbersome.
There’s also the broader political context of Puerto Rico and of instability.
There’s dissatisfaction with the performance of the government
at different levels and how they respond to emergencies.
We’re right now doing – collecting data as part of a survey, and the performance
of the emergency management agency is rated at 2.3, and that has been very
consistent since – there’s many patterns that are changing in the –
in the database as we obviously add cases, but that is something that,
from the beginning, seems to be very consistent.
So, when the hurricane – when the earthquakes happened,
I was engaged in a – in a broader effort of putting together long-term
sustainability transition scenarios in San Juan.
And that was one of the things that was disrupted by the earthquakes.
As we were pretty much having those discussions is when the aftershock
forecast came up, and all this information about the possibility
of a larger earthquake was very much a concern for residents.
It became very evident that there were spatial issues with how people
were interpreting the information that was available and how they were
personalizing the risk that the possibility of a larger earthquake
posed to themselves. And one of the things that we were
doing at the time was facilitating meetings in La Perla, which is
a community in San Juan. And, when we get there for one of the
meetings, they asked us what we were going to talk about,
and we pretty much – you know, we were going to discuss the
sustainability transition scenarios. And residents pretty much asked us
to shift the topic of the conversation for that night to talk about the earthquakes.
Because they were concerned about pretty much the construction of their
homes and the risk that a bigger earthquake would represent for them.
So we pulled out the visualization that was – had been – that had just
been published to discuss the aftershock forecast.
And it became very evident that people didn’t really understand the risk,
the spatial specificity of the forecast, and what it meant for them.
There’s also the challenge that COVID has presented to Puerto Rico
and obviously to the rest of the world, but that it has also made evident
the issue with risk communication. In terms of COVID, the main –
one of the main challenges is confirming the risk of transmission
because one of the things that happens is that, for example, throughout the
pandemic, we see press conferences where we are told that we have to
maintain physical distance, wear a mask, wash our hands, stay at home.
But then there’s these public gatherings that are very large and obviously
contradict the message that is being informed.
So, in that context, it became very evident that we really needed to
think about risk communication and about how we were going to
do this in the context of an economic crisis, an economic restructuration,
consecutive hazards, and different hazards.
So it’s a challenge with how disasters are conceptualized. As the literature
pretty much points out, disaster research has often focused on events,
ignoring the temporal dimension. And that has led to pretty much
undermining the experience of people. And there’s, you know, another
discussion that we could have in terms of how we define disaster and
who gets to define what is a disaster. But what we’re seeing pretty much is
a scenario where people are entangled in multiple stages of the disaster cycle.
So we really have to think about how we conceptualize these events and the
challenges that climate change and increasing the frequency
and intensity of hazards pose. There’s also the broader issue
with restoration, reconstruction, and recovery and how we define
and operationalize these terms. Recovery – it takes a very prolonged
period of time, really talking about a decade, but we are in a context
in which these hazards are pretty much coming in, or emerging,
more frequently. So we have to think about
how we can provide emergency services in a more expedited way.
And also how they can be more effective in addressing the needs
of residents. One of the things that we’ve been finding in areas that have
been severely affected by the recent events is that, for example, 70% of the
residents apply for disaster assistance, and 30% of them receive assistance.
So we really have to think about what’s going on there
and how damage is being assessed.
And there’s also, lastly, the issue of listening throughout these processes.
And it was something that pretty much was happening in my project.
We were doing sustainability transition scenarios, but we were only engaging
practitioners or representatives from NGOs.
We didn’t really have participation from residents.
And that really changed how risk is shaped, how sustainability is defined,
how transitions are tailored, and who they favor and who they serve.
So those are things that we’ve been pretty much thinking through,
and as part of that dilemma, we decided to pretty much
put together a project that has allowed me to collaborate with
a few of the folks that are here today. So that’s awesome to share a panel
with Sara, with Nnenia Campbell from the Natural Hazards Center,
which is also a colleague with which I have collaborated for many years.
And it’s an honor to have the opportunity to collaborate
with her on this project. And with Lorna.
We began putting together this project around March of last year, and we
were pretty much trying to find a place to submit that proposal.
We had a few hurdles, pandemic-related, along the way,
but we finally got the funding to launch this project last semester.
And we began collecting data pretty much, like, two weeks ago.
So it’s a project in which we’re doing in-depth interviews with responders to
understand risk information sources, how they make decisions, how they
navigate this context of multiple disasters, their perception of what
people are doing, how the process of promoting hazard adjustments
could be enhanced. We’re also doing door-to-door
surveys in three communities – in La Perla in San Juan because
they were one of the communities that wrote a support letter
for this proposal for us. Indios in Guayanilla, which is
the closest community to the epicenter of the – of the southwest
Puerto Rico earthquake. And with La Luna, which is also
in Barrio María Antonia in Guanica, which is one of the areas that was
more affected in terms of housing damage.
So that’s pretty much where we are. We have – we are pretty much in
the process of data collection. And what we seek to do with this
project is to collaborate with different users and with residents to co-produce
visualizations and risk communication products that allow us to convey
multiple risks and possible adjustments. One of the things that we are seeing
is that there seems to be a concern among government actors when
they talk about the possibility of an earthquake.
Their concern, for example, with population loss and the fact
that the municipalities around the epicenter of the earthquake
have lost a lot of population. So they don’t want to scare people.
And, at the same time, there seems to be a disconnection between the science
and those actors that produce the science and that pretty much can talk
about the hazard and those that can produce recommendations in terms of
adjustments and what people can do. And, as we know from the literature,
it’s not just a matter of knowing the risk that people are facing but also of
providing them with actions that they can adopt so they – that they feel
that they can do something about it. So that’s pretty much where I am.
Thank you very much for the invitation,
and I am open to discussions now – to questions now.