Puerto Rico ups Maria death toll, talks lessons learned

Puerto Rican officials on Tuesday raised the death toll from Hurricane Maria to 2,975 people in response to an independent study on the disaster. Researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University said many of the deaths attributed to the storm came in the weeks and months that followed when people had limited access to medical care.

The September 2017 Category 4 hurricane swept over the island and caused damages estimated at more than $100 billion. Nearly a year after the disaster, power outages are still common. The Puerto Rican government initially announced that 64 people died in the storm before raising the death toll to more than 1,400 earlier this month as it sought assistance from Congress.

Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute, said the deaths between September 2017 and February 2018 were 22 percent higher than the same timeframe in previous years. Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló acknowledged the island could have responded better to the disaster. He said the government would create a commission to study its hurricane response and prepare a registry of the most vulnerable people ahead of any other disaster. “We never anticipated a scenario of zero communication, zero energy, zero highway access,” Rosselló said. “I think the lesson is to anticipate the worst.”