A deep dive into the photojournalism and overall media coverage of Hurricane Maria and the challenges journalists will face covering Climate Change disasters of the future.
Angel Valentín for NPR
When a hurricane hits, photos take the surrounding world into the disaster so it can internalize the damage and help relieve its catastrophic realities.
Such was no different when Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico and its surrounding islands in September 2017. When President Donald Trump continued to neglect and dispute the storm’s fatal facts, journalists could counter by pointing to photos that showed entire nations in absolute peril. The devastation was indisputable.
But photos can’t tell the whole story. Following the storm the media was criticized for too often linking their coverage to Trump rather than to those profoundly affected by Maria. This helped reveal how climate change and the decimation of traditional media structures are setting journalists up to fail in their ability to adequately cover future natural disasters.
The challenges from Maria foreshadow a possible future where the earth will burn, melt, and flood without the public’s full attention, grim possibilities that were revealed by exploring the experience of photojournalists who covered the storm and the context and condition of the media landscape that surrounds them.
Into The Storm
Hurricane Maria began its ruinous path on September 18th, 2017. 160 mile per hour gusts slewed through Dominica, the first category five winds to ever hit the small Caribbean island with a prior population of just over 70,000. 65 people were reported dead or missing, and 95% of the island’s buildings were damaged or destroyed.
After seeing the lack of coverage on Dominica in the hours following the storm, photojournalist Tomas Ayuso was inspired to travel there to take pictures that would eventually appear in The Guardian and IRIN. He says the storm reminded him of Hurricane Mitch, the second deadliest Atlantic Hurricane on record that hit Honduras during Ayuso’s childhood there in 1998.
“It (Hurricane Mitch) was a very traumatic experience,” Ayuso said via phone in Mexico City before explaining how the experience conditioned him to be drawn to places not cared about by the media. Traveling to the Dominica was his instinct but only when he arrived could he understand why it was being neglected.
“I wanted to go there since nothing was coming out of there,” Ayuso continued. “When we got there we realized why...there was nothing left.”
Ayuso’s photograph’s captured much of the island’s in absolute ruin, but he said his work took the biggest toll on him when he saw how Maria impacted the personal lives of those living in more desolate areas of the island.
Ayuso travelled to Point Michelle, the south east tip of Dominica where he says mudslides enveloped cars, trees, houses. There he happened upon a bewildered wandering man who told him a story how the slides also took his grandson.
“You could tell that he had been traumatized,” Ayuso said of the man. In a scarred breathless tone he proceeded to tell Ayuso about the last time he saw his grandson. It was a few days earlier when the boy’s hand broke free from his after he was hit by a branch that would eventually washed him away with the sliding mud.
“He was just wandering hoping that he'd be dug up or something,” Ayuso continued. “It was devastating because no one had time to think about this boy because everyone was devastated equally.”
Although Ayuso didn’t get a photo of the man, he was there to report his story. Moments like these would stack up as Maria moved towards Puerto Rico. As it reared forward, photojournalists around the world including Joseph Rodríguez and Angel Valentín made it their duty to go to Puerto Rico to capture the devastation.
On The Ground in Puerto Rico
Both Rodríguez and Valentín have strong family ties to Puerto Rico. Valentín was born there before he moved to Miami while his parents remained in San Juan. Rodríguez’s Puerto Rican mother instilled his “Nuyorican” identity in him as a child growing up in Brooklyn. Rodríguez says that along with the violence that surrounded his adolescence led him to becoming a social documentarian focused on capturing humanity and struggle.
In 2015 Rodríguez made his first work trip back to Puerto Rico as he began his project, “Puerto Rican Lament” that would eventually appear in The New York Times. He went to Puerto Rico four separate times to capture the human side of the economic crisis that’s plagued the island since the late nineties before it reached a crescendo in 2017 when the the US territory declared bankruptcy.
In a media landscape where the stories that most need to be told are pushed to the margins by click bait, Rodríguez said that like most of his projects, his work covering Maria was self-assigned. His story was green lit by his New York Times editor but Rodríguez stressed his gratitude for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an organization that funds economic security reporting projects.
"Most of my projects are self-assigned work,” Rodríguez said via phone in New York. “You just have to get lucky with grants.”
Valentín monitored Maria closely from Miami as his family braved the storm. He didn’t have any way to communicate with them so he says he wanted to get on the island as soon as possible. After getting turned away from a coast guard plane for having too much luggage (he stocked up supplies for his family), he finally made it to the island as part of NPR’s initial team a few days later.
Upon the two men’s arrival about a week removed from the storm, Puerto Rico was starting its long reel from category five winds that knocked out 80-90 percent of the islands structures and nearly all of its power grids. 3.4 million Puerto Ricans were still in the dark with 95 percent of the islands wireless cell sites were out of service.
Both photographers could hardly recognize their second home.
“I felt like I was in a colonial country like Africa or someplace where the infrastructure is poor, poor electricity, poor water.” Rodríguez said. “But here I am in the 21st century looking at a part of the U.S. It was an eye opener.”
“You think flooding is the worst thing and you get there and find people survived the flooding but now they have no power, no way to get water or cook,” Valentín added. “So you have to adapt.”
Loaded with survival packs stocked with canned foods, satellite phones, gas, gear, and backup gear, Valentín and his reporting partner, Camila Domonos, set out to hunt for stories through San Juan.
Rodríguez started his journey in the Puerto Rican capital as well where he says most people were warm, upbeat, and wanting of his presence so their safety and story could be documented. Both photographers were intent on not just capturing cinematic vistas of the destruction but to also get intimate portraits of the people so they could evoke the human side of the destruction to the rest of the world.
Many of Rodríguez’s images depicted people in the beginning stages of recovery while others showed those wandering desperately for phone signal or waiting in line at food and water relief sites.
FEMA’s initial failures were evident.
“The municipality of San Juan handed out food and water, that wasn't FEMA, it was all local,” Rodríguez said.
Such is reflected in one of his more optimistic photos published in The New York Times that features volunteers gleefully posing as they handed out food to the community of Caguas, a small town located in the central mountain range of Puerto Rico.
“The reason why they're all jumping up and down, it's just, its solidarity,” Rodríguez said of the image. “We’re showing America that we're going to look out for our own here, we haven’t given up and we’ll fight back.
Images like these were vital to Puerto Rico’s recovery since they spread senses of hope and relief to the island and around the world, two things Puerto Ricans weren’t getting from FEMA or President Trump.
Puerto Ricans remained much on their own in the weeks following the storm. It took FEMA a month to provide full disaster relief to the island. While some of this was due to Trump’s negligence, FEMA released an internal report months after the storm concluding their emergency supply warehouses were too vastly depleted to handle Maria after a busy storm season that saw six major hurricanes hit around the world.
Beyond San Juan
The impacts of these relief failures could be felt more within remote areas of the island like Coamo and Utuado where Rodríguez and Valentín traveled next respectively. A majority of the island lacked access to drinking water in the week following the storm. Rodríguez says it was gut wrenching watching and capturing people forced to bath and cook with contaminated water from the mountains.
“What really rocked me was going up to Utuado in the mountains and finding this woman standing in the road washing her hair in the water from the mountains,” he said. “Just a few feet over this old woman had to collect this water in this barrel. I found that to be really quite profound.”
Valentín shared similar experiences from his time in Coamo where the town’s river became a water refuge for many on the island. He says while he was on his way there one day, he captured his most harrowing reflection of the moment many fear most after a storm: returning home.
The image (at top of story) depicts a man named Juan Pablo whom Valentín said had just finished building out a shed next to his home before Maria hit. His house was completely destroyed and in his shed only concrete, wood, and remnants of work out machines and cooking grills remained standing.
“What do you do when you go through a storm that kicked your ass for 12 hours and you're finally able to open the doors and come out of your house and see everything blown away,” Valentín said of the image. “You just don't know where to start and that's what these people were doing, starting the long and tiresome and emotionally draining process of trying to get some semblance of normality.”
These stories are just snippets of the dystopia Puerto Ricans faced in the months following Maria. While they remained battered, bruised, and in the dark from disaster,
President Trump continued his blatant negligence of his fellow American citizens in Puerto Rico. He spent the weekend following the storm golfing at his club in New Jersey and tweeting misguided and hurtful attacks on Puerto Rican leadership. He called the storm “not a catastrophe like Katrina” and only traveled there two weeks after the fact to throw paper towels at Americans whose lives were in utter and obvious ruin and to insist the death toll remained less than 20.
Trump’s carelessness was soon counterattacked by journalists and researchers around the world.
Analyzing The Media’s Coverage of Hurricane Maria
After the storm’s death toll was upped from 16 to 64 in December, Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health concluded a study that raised the Maria toll to 2,975 deaths, a number that has since been updated to nearly 5,000 by scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
While journalists also helped reveal that FEMA left close to 2,000 palettes of water on a runway in Ceiba and halted FEMA’s threat to end aid just months after the storm, the media as a whole was criticized for neglecting Puerto Rico in its coverage unless the story had a connection to President Trump.
A week after the storm the outlet FiveThirtyEight published an article titled "The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico” that compared the coverage of Maria to that of other recent US natural disasters.
According to FiveThirtyEight, in the week following the storm the phrase “national anthem” was said in more sentences on TV news than “Puerto Rico” and “Hurricane Maria” combined, a reflection of the media and Trump’s higher emphasis on the National Football League’s national anthem debate then the one of the deadliest storm to ever hit the U.S.
FiveThirtyEight also revealed that Hurricane Maria received just 1,000 sentences per day from top U.S. news outlets’ first week of coverage while coverage of Hurricane Irma and Harvey tripled that number in the week following each storm.
These failures made the images that did come out of Hurricane Maria all the more important. Neglected by the media, it was photographs like those by Ayuso, Valentín, and Rodríguez, along with those from outlets who did cover the storm that were vital in translating the depth of the disaster to the world. Valentín says the images made up for some of the negligence surrounding the disaster.
“They kept the story going because it was such a disaster of mismanagement and poor administrative planning,” he said. “If it wasn't for the photographer’s attention, a lot of people would still be left in the dark, literally in the dark.”
Journalism’s Landscape in Puerto Rico
Barbara Idalissee Abadía-Rexach is a communications scholar, social anthropologist, and assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She also contributes a monthly op-ed column to Puerto Rico’s most prominent national newspaper, El Nuevo Día.
Abadía-Rexach says Puerto Ricans initially struggled to learn about the storm beyond what they were hearing within their town or community. She couldn’t grasp the enormity of Maria until she left Puerto Rico a few weeks after the storm.
“When I went to the U.S. I started looking at the images and I realized, wow, this is huge,” Abadía-Rexach said. “I wasn’t able to watch the news here in Puerto Rico. The coverage people did from outside was great.”
Abadía-Rexach explained how journalism’s landscape was fractured even before Maria hit Puerto Rico, contributing to the local media’s difficulties covering the storm. She says El Nuevo Dia laid off close to 50 journalists in the months leading up to the storm and a month afterwards, on October 26th, El Nuevo Día laid off 59 employees including reporters, editors, and graphic designers.
During Maria, Abadía-Rexach says El Nuevo Día’s staff was so small they rented out much of their newsroom space to FEMA. El Nuevo Día’s struggles parallel the problems journalism faces throughout the rest of the world.
"Nuevo Día is more about ads and short info on arts and music, not about the other important things we need to know about on the island,” Rexach said. “We need to add information to empower the people like how climate change effects the island economically, the health of the people, everything. It’s missing, I don't think we are empowered by the media we consume.”
To stay relevant within condensed attention spans more occupied by social media than news, some media companies are forced to emphasize clickbait content over more pressing stories on prominent issues.
“It’s a lot easier to cover a Beyonce record release than it is to go to cover the impact of global warming and how a hurricane can wipe out an entire island,” Angel Valentín said.
Abadía-Rexach says these changed attitudes towards the media are reflected in the behaviors of the students she teaches at at the University of Puerto Rico.
“Students in general here are more concerned with graphic design and public relations than journalism,” she said. “When you are in the classroom and you ask them about news on the island, they don't know…they only know what they saw on Instagram. So we are facing that problem too.”
Future Challenges Covering Climate Change
These journalism realities in Puerto Rico highlight just how big of a future challenge it will be to report on climate change there and in other similar small nations around the world. Not only will newsrooms continue to dwindle but the reporters who do cover natural disasters say it's difficult having to endure the intense mental toll that comes with covering natural disasters.
“It was more painful emotionally than any story I've covered,” Angel Valentín said of his experience in Puerto Rico. “I still feel human when I sit back at the end of a day and drink a beer and smoke a cigar after listening to all these people tell their stories and unload on me, I can only shake my head like my god these people are screwed.”
“You acquire PTSD and it just builds and builds,” Joseph Rodríguez added. “Any soldier goes through this.”
But the photographers say they were driven to the storm because they found reassurance in the fact that their pain was a product of helping to relieve that of disaster victims, a notion that photojournalists must embrace as they plunge into climate change coverage themselves.
“What keeps me going is the people,” Rodriguez said. “What gives me solace and hope is knowing that at least I am not sitting at home complaining on Facebook. “I’m meeting the issues head on, I'm not just reading about them.”
Their experiences reflect how photojournalists must find value in the work’s empowering qualities rather than its potential for praise, clicks, and compensation.
“You’re going to get more traction on a story about a record or movie release than one about human suffering and the environment degradation,” Valentin said. “But what happens if we don't cover those stories?”
Valentin raises a pressing issue facing future climate change journalism. While he and the other photojournalists were able to cover Maria, Tomas Ayuso fears for when two Maria sized storms hit in two consecutive weeks and journalists are forced to choose between one devastated country from another.
“If yearly two or three Marias hit different parts of the Americas, then the Americas are quite frankly, very bluntly, fucked,” he said.
Lessons and Conclusions
Hurricane Maria’s dire consequences extend beyond its current repercussions when examining its coverage with respect to journalism’s future. The second most destructive US storm in over a century serves as a warning for the challenges future journalists will face providing climate change with the kind of extensive coverage it requires.
Ayuso, Valentín, and Rodríguez agreed its journalists duty to keep digging into the important issues like climate change, but for stories to stick they must be concerted, compelling and individualized.
“If the classical definition of journalism is to bear witness and provide a record, I think that the addendum for the saturated and distracted era we live in is to bear witness, provide a record, and tell a compelling story with more of an individual take,” Ayuso said.
For photojournalists, Rodríguez says much of that means taking a step back, slowing down, and emphasizing the stories that matter.
“I find that we as photojournalists move so quickly, almost too quickly and I believe that photography has suffered because of that,” Rodríguez said. “We need to return to the time we used to take for things. There’s an alarm bell that goes off because how much do we retain, how much of our history are we really remembering?”
On the consumer side, the photojournalists stressed the importance of supporting local and small journalism outlets and companies like The Economic Hardship Reporting Project that made Rodríguez’s coverage possible.
Lastly, while iPhones and social media contribute to the saturation issues plaguing journalism, they also provide the opportunity for ordinary people to become citizen journalists. Smartphones should be harnessed as tools to provide records of the events media companies can’t. If these responsibilities of both the photojournalist and the common citizen are not fulfilled, disaster victims may be forgotten and records of entire nations could wash away in climate change’s future floods.
“Puerto Rico was lucky in a way in that we were paid attention to,” Valentin said. “But in the future if you're not being documented you essentially don't exist.”
Works Cited:
Anderson, J. L. (2018, September 15). What Donald Trump Fails to Recognize About Hurricanes-and Leadership. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-donald-trump-fails-to-recognize-about-hurricanesand-leadership
Barclay, E., Campbell, A. F., & Irfan, U. (2018, September 20). 4 ways Hurricane Maria changed Puerto Rico - and the rest of America. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2018/9/20/17871330/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-damage-death-toll-trump
Campbell, A. F. (2017, October 16). FEMA has yet to authorize full disaster help for Puerto Rico. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/3/16400510/fema-puerto-rico-hurricane
Campbell, A. F. (2018, August 15). It took 11 months to restore power to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. A similar crisis could happen again. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/8/15/17692414/puerto-rico-power-electricity-restored-hurricane-maria
Elie, J. (2017, November 01). 'It feels like Dominica is finished': Life amid the ruins left by Hurricane Maria | Janise Elie. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/nov/01/it-feels-like-dominica-is-finished-life-amid-the-ruins-left-by-hurricane-maria
Harris, R. (2018, May 29). Study Puts Puerto Rico Death Toll From Hurricane Maria Near 5,000. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/29/615120123/study-puts-puerto-rico-death-toll-at-5-000-from-hurricane-maria-in-2017
Holpuch, A. (2018, August 28). Hurricane Maria: Puerto Rico raises official death toll from 64 to 2,975. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/28/hurricane-maria-new-death-toll-estimate-is-close-to-3000
Hurricane Maria's Devastation Of Puerto Rico, 1 Year Later. (2018, September 23). Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/09/23/650956637/hurricane-marias-devastation-of-puerto-rico-1-year-later
Madani, D. (2018, September 13). FEMA Says It Left Puerto Rico Water Stockpile Outside To Save Money. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fema-bottled-water-hurricane-maria_us_5b9ab22ae4b0b64a336cfb3b
Mazzei, P. (2018, February 08). What Puerto Rico Is, and Isn't, Getting in Disaster Relief. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/us/puerto-rico-disaster-relief.html
Meyer, R. (2017, October 04). What's Happening With the Relief Effort in Puerto Rico? Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/what-happened-in-puerto-rico-a-timeline-of-hurricane-maria/541956/
Sullivan, L. (2018, May 02). How Puerto Rico's Debt Created A Perfect Storm Before The Storm. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/05/02/607032585/how-puerto-ricos-debt-created-a-perfect-storm-before-the-storm
© 2018 ABC News Internet Ventures. (2017, September 29). The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico. Retrieved from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-really-has-neglected-puerto-rico/
Photographer Works:
Tomas Ayuso:
https://www.irinnews.org/photo-feature/2017/10/30/dominica-s-devastation-and-recovery-pictures
Joseph Rodríguez:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/23/opinion/sunday/23EXPOSURES.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/opinion/sunday/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria.html
Angel Valentín
https://www.npr.org/sections/altlatino/2018/09/20/649753700/puerto-rico-one-year-after-maria
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/09/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-six-stories
Read for Context and Background:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt-mpuR_QHQ