Puerto Rico was bust b4 this. They are so screwed. .... As the storms pass the financial picture will grow to be the more important story.
Agree, economics will prove an interesting angle for every coming component of climate change. First the smaller islands, which have no prospects of ever having real economies, go hopelessly underwater economically, then the larger islands like PR which only limped along as a tax haven for pharmas, then the really big islands like North America which can only pay for so many katrinas, sandys, harveys, irmas, PRs, and St Croixs.
PR did not have deep pockets going into this; ironically the hurricane may give them a force majeure exit clause to their $72 billion debt. But who then would purchase the next go-round, hurricane redevelopment bonds?
PR is not a state; they are not represented in Congress, people cannot vote in elections. In terms of bond guarantees or massive federal aid to second-class citizens, not gonna happen. Instead, more millions will emigrate to NYC and Miami even as the flood of illegals into PR continues.
How Hedge Funds Are Pillaging Puerto Rico - The American Prospect
prospect.org/article/how-hedge-funds-are-pillaging-puerto-rico
Dec 11, 2015 - But looked at another way, Puerto Rico is just the latest battlefield for a phalanx of hedge funds called “vultures,” which pick at the withered ...
Hedge Funds That Flocked to Puerto Rico Bonds Face Long Road Out ...
https://www.bloomberg.com/.../hedge-funds-that-flocked-to-puerto-rico-bonds-face-l...Apr 24, 2017 - Hedge funds first starting buying Puerto Rico debt in the summer of 2013 because they liked what they saw: A government that was paying high ...
Message of Puerto Rico Debt Crisis: Easy Bets Sometimes Lose - The ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/.../puerto-rico-creditors-hedge-funds.html?mcubz...May 4, 2017 - When some of Wall Street's savviest hedge funds piled into Puerto Rico's debt in 2014, it seemed like an easy bet: Buy up the island's bonds at ...
Aurelius hedge fund seeks to toss Puerto Rico's bankruptcy filing
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-puertorico-debt-bankruptcy-idUSKBN1AN27HAug 7, 2017 - Puerto Rico's bankruptcy, aimed at restructuring $72 billion of debt, violates the U.S. Constitution and should be dismissed, the Aurelius Capital ...
That's the first extruded hurricane imagery we've seen, very effective in perspective. There's a link to the fabulous full resolution 5033 x 2795 pixel image below and a snippet at scale attached. It's a Modis infrared from Terra. It was made from the grayscale using a linear temperature assumption for the DEM, then draped with the same image in the palette shown:colder clouds higher in the atmosphere are white; warmer lower clouds appear purple etc.
We can make these in ImageJ using "3D Surface Plot", only nowhere near as nicely. The person who made the image is not credited.
https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/91000/91004/maria_tmo_2017263_lrg.pngThe story that carries the image has some interesting bits:
The passage of the eye wall over 3,000-foot terrain must have resulted in incredible rainfall amounts—similar to Harvey but occurring in just a day,” said Stephen Munchak, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91004
The highest elevations in PR are on Cerro de Punta at 4,390 feet (1,338 meters) and El Yunque at 3,494 feet (1,065 m). The mountain town of Caguas PR received almost 40" of rain in one day with 14.3" in one hour. The flow in the nearby river, the Rio Grande de Loiza, increased 200-fold, briefly exceeding 40,000 cfs.