Confronting the true toll of ‘natural’ disasters

Hey there,

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve seen Hurricane Melissa cause devastation in Jamaica and Cuba. At least 75 people are known to have died. But reporting on natural disasters is complicated, and it takes time for stories and data to go from fuzzy to clear.

Alongside the immediate damage to homes and property, harvests have been lost to flooding and the economic harm keeps rising. The true death toll, too, will take time to become clear. Government workers are fighting to keep on top of essential administration. Electricity and internet access are scarce. There are missing people everywhere and hospitals and morgues are in crisis mode. Recording of deaths is not straightforward either.

Omaya Sosa Pascual, an investigative journalist from Puerto Rico, knows this all too well. “I’m sure things in Jamaica are much worse than they’re saying. The question is how are they investigating and how are they getting the data? It takes a long time – it took us a year.”

In 2017, a storm of a never-seen-before scale called Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, an archipelago in the Caribbean. After the storm cleared, Pascual worked on a project with 30 others to investigate the real death toll. It took them a year, and grew from involving just a small investigative unit in Puerto Rico called Centro de Peridismio Investigativo (CPI), to a massive collaboration with Quartz and the Associated Press, as well as local university students and PhD researchers. 

The very first story that Pascual published with CPI challenged the government’s official line that only 16 people had died. It suggested that there could be hundreds more. 

A year later, when the cross-media investigation came to life as Hurricane Maria’s Dead, the stories and details of 487 deaths were recorded for the world to see. 

It challenged the government’s low estimates through personal, fact-checked stories, but also analysed why people had died. “This was a slow-motion, months-long disaster,” the resulting story notes.

The project looked not only at immediate deaths during the storm, but those that died afterwards because of the damage. Patients who relied on dialysis or oxygen or cancer treatment, unable to get the healthcare needed to keep them alive. One disabled woman died of sepsis after her bedsores, exacerbated by the lack of fresh water and electricity, became infected. Lack of access to water and food killed others. And some were cut off from communication and couldn’t get help because the storm had damaged roads and caused landslides.

In response to this investigation and other media and research reports, the government eventually changed the official count of Hurricane Maria deaths.

“We forced them to revise their numbers and death toll,” Pascual says, "and to tell the truth”. “They almost asked for forgiveness,” she adds, referring to the governor Ricardo Rosselló’s admission that mistakes were made. In 2018, the governor commissioned George Washington University to research mortality statistics around the hurricane. He then accepted the results and ordered for the count to be changed from 64 to 2,975.

Pascual says that the in-depth reporting on the government failures showed that a human-made disaster followed the natural disaster. The investigation pushed the government to update their emergency plans for future calamities.

“To this day, it's a reference for many,” she said, recalling conversations with journalists from other regions like the British Virgin Islands who have since reached out to ask for help to see how they can investigate death tolls post hurricanes. “Similar things happen in other islands and they didn't have the know-how or the manpower to investigate.”

“We were used to hurricanes, but nothing like this. This was a total blackout. We didn't even know where our staff members were.

There were no TV stations on air and no newspapers that were publishing. Only one radio station continued to broadcast. The governor was using this station to communicate with the population. People were anxious, and they would queue up outside the radio station to ask about missing family members.

On the radio, I heard the governor say that thankfully there were only 16 casualties and they had managed to rescue a lot of people. I thought to myself: this doesn't make sense

It felt like we had to believe whatever he was saying on the radio. I began to add up the numbers. And after I spoke to, say, ten doctors, I thought: wait a minute. I’m only speaking to ten doctors and the count is already multifold of what the government has revealed.

That’s how the investigation came about.

Six days after the hurricane, I published the first story saying the number the government was giving was not true.

I also interviewed the owner of a big hospital chain and he told me there were so many more corpses in their morgue.

I decided to travel across municipalities. I had to go back to basics – using pen, paper and an iPhone which I could charge with my car, based on how much gas I had. But gas stations weren’t open either and I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to cover ground. So I asked for help from another reporter and Jeniffer Wiscovitch Padilla came on board.

For three months we were visiting municipalities, morgue, funeral homes, hospitals, police stations, emergency rescue centres as well as the mayor’s office. We were starting to build our own database of missing people and dead people from scratch.

We tracked missing person flyers from the streets, from social media – whenever we could connect to the internet – urban centres and funeral homes.

The main character in my first story was the family member of a man who had been dead for seven days in his house before they could reach him or his body.

After three months, Jeniffer and I felt like we were never going to finish this. There were so many towns to cover, and there wasn’t enough manpower. Puerto Rico has 78 municipalities.

The first collaboration started with Quartz. They sent Ana Campoy – a Mexican journalist – to Puerto Rico to cover the hurricane. And she asked me for dinner, because we were old friends. And over a glass of wine, she said: ‘I want to work on this story. But it’s your story. We just want to help you. How can we help you?’

And I said, sure, why not? Let's do this.

And it was then the team of three. The team of three became a team of four. Two Puerto Ricans, a Mexican, and a Chinese programmer: Youyou Zhou.

They came up with the idea of a Google form to collect data from an online survey. We structured it so it would be compatible with the mortality database of Puerto Rico. We got 500 reports in a couple of months.

Meanwhile we sued the government for the misinformation around mortality statistics, and this got a lot of coverage from international media. This is when we worked with Associated Press (AP) and they decided to come on board.

The AP under Michael Weissenstein put all their Caribbean team on the project. We did the heavy lifting in the reporting because we were on the ground. But they did the heavy lifting on programming. We also brought on board Puerto Rico’s best university specialising in psychology: Carlos Albizu University. Their PhD students were brought in to make all the phone calls.

We got the death certificates, which had more information. We put out those certificates on the cloud and made them searchable.

It was a very big project. And it took us from one person to more than 30 of us in the end. And it was just lovely.”

Reporting on hurricanes also changes newsrooms for the future. Pascual says that now their little investigative unit is geared up for emergencies – they have solar power, backups and even a bed for whoever may need to sleep. 

If you’d like to listen to more investigations around hurricanes, try the Atlantic’s Floodlines podcast, which re-examines Hurricane Katrina and analyses the misinformation, racism and social inequalities that surrounded the disaster. 

This kind of reporting requires time and resources. Take TBIJ’s Dying Homeless project, when my colleagues counted the number of deaths between October 2017 and March 2019 to tell the stories of 800 of men and women who died while sleeping rough or living in temporary accommodation. It's so important that reporters have the time to do this work well to do it justice – that's why we need more people to join our community of members, the Bureau Insiders. Please become one today: 

Have a lovely week,