Puerto Rico Faces Mountain of Obstacles on the Road to Recovery

For Puerto Rico, long crippled by enormous debt and an essentially bankrupt financial system, the road to recovery just went from long to seemingly endless. Still reeling from Hurricane Irma, which knocked out 70 percent of the power when it grazed the island two weeks ago, it faces a mountain of need in the coming months just as the federal government is stretched to the limit grappling with the destruction left by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

And unlike Texas and Florida, politically powerful states on the mainland, Puerto Rico is an impoverished, Spanish-speaking commonwealth. It is an island to boot, making aid delivery all the more cumbersome and expensive.

Since Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, we can expect a large number will move to the mainland either temporarily or permanently: