By Katherine Rapin for Next City.
Broadcast version by Trimmel Gomes for Florida News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

For two weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Lucy's Pizza was the only restaurant open in the central mountain town of Adjuntas. The town's 18,000 residents, like those on the rest of the island, were entirely without electricity.

"No one has power, you can't get gas, it's difficult to make food, so everyone came here to eat," says owner Gustavo Irizarry. "The line," he gestured down the block along the town's central plaza, "endless."

Using a diesel generator, Lucy's was running at about 75% capacity. The generator was loud, emitted dangerous fumes and wasn't always reliable. Irizarry was often up in the middle of the night to restart the generator because of the risk of losing power to the refrigerators. He didn't want ingredients to spoil.

Now, nearly six years later, Irizarry is poised to generate his own energy from the sun. He's one of 14 merchants in downtown Adjuntas who invested in the island's first community-owned solar microgrids - expected to go live before the height of hurricane season this summer.

"After Maria, we saw the vulnerability and the necessity to have an electric system that truly works," Irizarry says. "To have better, alternative power, to be able to live."

The microgrid project is the latest effort in a two decades-long grassroots movement to build energy security in Puerto Rico in the form of solar power.

Irizarry had spent $15,000 on diesel in the six months he was without power after Maria. When the grid finally came back on, the cost of energy kept rising - electric bills were sucking up 30% of Lucy's operating expenses. Meanwhile, a longstanding energy independence initiative was paying dividends while providing reliable power in his own backyard.

A few blocks from the pizza shop, dozens of Adjunteños gathered at another community refuge - this one powered by renewable energy. Environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo installed their first solar panels in 1999 and retrofitted the system to be completely off-grid just months before the hurricane. Locals came to charge phones, run dialysis machines, and store medications in the center's refrigerators. One neighbor came daily to administer her son's asthma treatment.

Founded in 1980, Casa Pueblo is well known across the island and among the diaspora, who were sending aid, trying, in part, to make up for the inadequate federal response after the hurricane. Across the island, groups like the Casa Pueblo have relied on deep roots in the community to create local buy-in and lead an equitable transition to energy security.

"We told people, we don't want money - send us solar lamps," says Arturo Massol Deyá, who along with his father leads Casa Pueblo's efforts in Adjuntas. For practical reasons, yes, and because he saw an opportunity to educate the community about solar energy.

And it worked. Locals started looking to Casa Pueblo for solutions, including business owners like Irizarry.

A community-owned solution

Spread across the roofs of seven buildings in town, the island's first community-owned solar microgrid will be able to power businesses that provide essential services for the community: a pharmacy, a hardware store, a bakery and Irizarry's pizza shop, among others.

The microgrids - comprising two half-megawatt battery storage systems connected to 700 solar panels - will be connected to the central grid. In the case of an outage, they can "island," relying on their own generation and storage.

The systems will enable businesses to be energy oases during prolonged outages and pay - to the nonprofit the owners formed - a lower rate for energy year-round. Proceeds will be invested in solar projects for the community, starting with the homes of the most vulnerable residents.

The aim: building resilience in the face of increasing climate impacts, while generating wealth across Adjuntas.

The $2 million project was led by Casa Pueblo in partnership with the solar-energy focused Honnold Foundation and local business owners, and with the support of University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, among others.

It's the latest effort in Casa Pueblo's "Energy Insurrection," a movement to become an entirely solar-powered town and model energy resilience for communities across Puerto Rico.

"The microgrid is a major step in taking Puerto Rico from the vulnerability of the centralized fossil fuel system to the aspiration that I think we share in Puerto Rico," says Arturo Massol Deyá. "To use local fuels and generate power at the point of consumption, where it's needed."

As storm-induced outages become more frequent, local generation and storage have become more critical, and not only on islands. The United States' 700 microgrids, more than half of which were built since 2015, already provide reliable power for places like hospitals, schools and airports. By 2035, the Department of Energy expects microgrids will be "essential building blocks of the future electricity delivery system to support resilience, decarbonization, and affordability."

With 350 residential and essential service buildings already running on solar and the town center set to be powered by two microgrids, Adjuntas has become a model for how a community can transition to solar power. Members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have endorsed the solar movement in Adjuntas; in March, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm met with leaders at Casa Pueblo to discuss strategies for Puerto Rico to completely transition to renewable energy by 2050.

"They're leading by example, showing that 100% solar power is possible for Puerto Rico," Granholm commented after her visit.

Leaders attribute their success to an approach that starts with bolstering solar education and access, relies on deep knowledge of the specific local needs, and builds wealth and resilience through community ownership of clean energy generation.

Born out of necessity

Despite $12 billion of federal funding allocated for rebuilding energy infrastructure since Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico's central grid is still in disrepair.

Outages after Fiona in 2022 exposed the persistent vulnerabilities of a system that's reliant on imported fossil fuels, 32,000 miles of distribution lines and a public utility that's $9 billion in debt. Since private American-Canadian company LUMA took over the island's transmission and distribution in 2021, rates have increased more than seven times and blackouts have continued.

Puerto Ricans experience the consequences on a daily or weekly basis, while spending 8% of their income ($21,967, on average) on electricity, compared to 2.4% on the U.S mainland. To keep cool during increasingly frequent heat waves, islanders are using more energy - causing blackouts amid exceedingly dangerous temperatures.

Hundreds of renewable energy advocates, many represented by the movement Queremos Sol (We Want Sun), say the solution is obvious. Rooftop solar alone could potentially provide four times the island's residential energy demand, Department of Energy studies have shown.

Despite efforts to transition to renewables and the local government's goal of sourcing 100% renewable energy percent by 2050, the island currently sources less than 4% from renewables.

The utility Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) has instead advanced natural gas projects without federal regulatory approval and even proposed a fee on energy generated by rooftop solar to help restructure their debt. In April, a group of environmental non-profits sued FEMA, claiming that the federal agency's plans to rebuild the grid "fail to meaningfully consider relying on distributed renewable energy systems."

The Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund's $1 billion, approved by Congress last year and managed by the U.S. DOE, isn't expected to be allocated until the end of 2023. In the meantime, the DOE team is collecting input from community leaders like those at Casa Pueblo, who have been on the ground developing their own solutions for the past six years.

La Insurrección Energética

Since distributing 14,000 solar lamps after Maria, Casa Pueblo has built a public solar park and installed more than 350 solar systems on homes and essential service buildings.

Homes with solar are saving an average of $40 per month on energy bills, Casa Pueblo estimates, and were able to maintain power when Fiona hit last fall.

These ongoing projects have given locals the opportunity to see the benefits of solar energy firsthand and garnered support for the microgrid, which has been four years in the making.

In 2019, leaders at Casa Pueblo were considering the potential impacts of solarizing businesses in downtown Adjuntas - providing energy security in the heart of the community while disrupting the fossil fuel industry by unplugging those with the highest energy demands, as Massol Deyá saw it. Meanwhile, business owners like Izairry were looking for alternatives.

But as the microgrid idea was taking shape, Casa Pueblo's late co-founder Tinti Deyá Diaz wasn't totally on board; she wanted to ensure lower-income residents would continue to benefit from the solar transition.

Her concern led the 14 businesses owners who will receive power from the microgrid to form the nonprofit Asociación Comunitaria Energia Solar Adjuntas (Community Solar Energy Association of Adjuntas, or ACESA), essentially operating as an independent utility.

They'll pay 25 cents per kWh to themselves, about 10 cents cheaper than what they'd pay the utility. After covering maintenance and operation costs, proceeds will be reinvested in community solar projects, prioritizing homes of the most vulnerable Adjunteños.

It's a model many communities on the island are interested in replicating. Last October, Casa Pueblo organized a community meeting to bring together about 30 groups working on solar projects on the island. Attendees included folks working on a microgrid project in Maricao, a mountain town of about 5,000. They're also aiming to solarize local businesses, including the town's only bank, which doesn't have a backup generator.

It hasn't been easy to get some business owners to commit to a 20-year project (the approximate life of the panels and batteries), says Andrew Hermann, director of Monte Azul Foundation, which is spearheading the Maricao project.

When residents of the mountain town visited Casa Pueblo, "seeing [the microgrid] in person and talking to business owners that are super pro-microgrid - it's really assuring the business owners here," Hermann says. "That's the type of energy that helps build these projects from the ground up."

Adjuntas is also the site of microgrid resilience research by scientists at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez and other U.S. Universities.

"What happens if you lose 30-40% of the [power] generation in one solar array due to a hurricane?" says Maximiliano Ferrari, an engineer at the Oak Ridge lab and among the leaders of the research team.

The team is working to develop a technology to connect the two microgrids - which they call a "microgrid orchestrator" - enabling them to share energy if one is compromised. Referred to as networking or clustering, this nascent technology is expected by many in the industry to be an important component of future microgrids.

Ferrari says the project in Adjuntas is a perfect - and rare - testing site, because the microgrids are so close together. The team plans to start testing the microgrid orchestrator this summer. At the end of the project, all the developments will be open sourced, says Ferrari.

"Solar energy, for an even better country!"

The project still faces the challenge of connecting to the central grid. Only time will tell how the goals of ACESA will play out in reality. Massol Deyá acknowledges mistakes along the way - for one, the project was costlier than it could have been.

"But it's the first time; you have to do it to have that experience, and use that to help others," says Massol Deyá. "We share what we have done - the challenges, the limitations, the complications."

The developments in Adjuntas have already been put to the test with Hurricane Fiona.

A Category 1 storm when it hit in the fall of 2022, just days after the five-year anniversary of Maria, Fiona caused prolonged outages across the island. But in Adjuntas, the solar-powered fire station was able to respond to local needs and even intercept calls from the station in Ponce, 15 miles south, which had lost power. Casa Pueblo's solar radio broadcast was uninterrupted; remote workers gathered at the solar park to plug in; many residents with medical conditions were able to continue treatments thanks to the panels on their roofs.

Hours after the storm, one family posted on Casa Pueblo's social media thanking them for the solar system that allowed their daughter to continue her dialysis during and after the storm.

In March, thousands lined the streets of Adjuntas for Casa Pueblo's Marcha del Sol to show support for solar energy and celebrate the completion of the microgrid.

"Energía so-lar - pa' un mejor país!" they shouted. Solar energy, for a better country!

"When you see the entire landscape, you know that we are still at risk - we are going to be confronting the same climate change challenges, hurricanes, earthquakes," says Massol Deyá. "But I can say, and it was tested with Fiona, that Adjuntas is in a better position to confront these realities."


Katherine Rapin wrote this article for Next City.


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Indiana environmental advocates are facing uncertainties following the election.

Changes in federal leadership could shift key environmental protections, creating questions for state policies on coal ash and water quality.

Sam Carpenter, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, noted federal regulations, like those from the Environmental Protection Agency, have helped Indiana manage environmental challenges, including addressing unlined coal ash pits contaminating groundwater. With shifting federal priorities, there is a question of what will happen to the protections.

"The EPA had recently come out with guidelines that require those to be cleaned up," Carpenter pointed out. "There are similar things with coal-fired power plants where we still rely quite a bit on our coal power generation which is dirty."

Carpenter argued the plants are costly and harmful to health and the climate. Supporters of reduced regulation argue scaling back federal oversight could ease economic pressures on Indiana's coal industry and reduce costs for energy providers.

Carpenter expressed concern over Indiana's legislative stance, emphasizing a need for strong regulations to protect the well-being of Hoosiers and natural resources in the state amid increased development.

"What we need to think about is protection of our health, protection of our water, of our natural assets," Carpenter emphasized. "In our statehouse there is a real concern about regulation. We rely on some protection for natural resources."

Despite the challenges, Carpenter urged residents to stay hopeful and engaged, stressing involvement is a powerful antidote to despair. He assured supporters the council would keep pushing for clean energy, water quality improvements and partnerships across political lines to secure a healthier environment.


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Hispanic families who fish to put food on the table are disproportionately affected by mercury, which accumulates in seafood in Southern California.

Surveys at 10 piers in Los Angeles and Orange counties found 60% of the anglers were Latino and native Spanish speakers, and 78% of them were fishing to feed their families.

Sofia Barboza, ocean manager for the Hispanic Access Foundation, said the families are exposed to toxins in fish from polluted waters.

"We found that Hispanic anglers in California are actually ingesting an average of 13.9 micrograms of mercury per day via fish consumption that they had caught in local waters," Barboza reported. "This is double the amount of mercury that has been determined as safe by the EPA."

Fish with high mercury levels have also been found in the Bay Area, the Central Coast near Humboldt and Deer Creek. A newly-released report from the foundation about Latinos in U.S. fisheries found 5% of Latinos in California, or about 785,000 people, work in the agricultural, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining sectors. But no research yet exists to determine how many Latinos are in commercial fishing.

Barboza suggested the warning signs about pollution at the piers, as well as government websites, should be translated into Spanish.

"Even though 28% of the California population speaks Spanish, the California Fish and Wildlife Department fishing regulations are not provided in Spanish on their website," Barboza pointed out. "Something we would like to see moving forward."

The report also recommends stronger oversight of commercial fishing companies hiring Hispanic migrant workers on H2B visas to ensure they receive fair wages, safe working conditions and access to safe housing.

By Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney for Capital B News.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Rural News Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Robert Thomas' home is still standing after the coffee-colored floodwaters of Hurricane Helene rushed through his community, but everything that made up his life has been swept away.

Thirteen days after Helene first made landfall in the U.S., it is known that at least 230 people died during the storm's surge, with hundreds of people still unaccounted for. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency ultimately sent out more than 7,000 employees and thousands of volunteers poured into the region with tons of food, clothes, water, and other supplies, it still took days for aid to reach some people - particularly Black low-income people, the elderly, and those living with disabilities.

"There's always a major disparity," said Thomas, who remains without electricity or clean water, but has already been denied aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because his home didn't receive any physical flood or wind damage.

"You see which communities get up and running quicker," he said. Within two days of the catastrophic storm, he said he noticed utility workers restoring power in the majority white and wealthy areas of Asheville.

He, like most people who've been on social media over the past two weeks, quickly saw conspiracy theories about how the federal government was planning, or not planning, to respond to the storm.

Helene's devastation far exceeded most people's predictions, pointing to why it took FEMA time to get to some of the hardest hit areas such as western North Carolina and Augusta, Georgia. Most residents Capital B spoke to ultimately applauded the federal response to the storm. Yet, it is in those long days between the storm's destruction and when people can get back to their lives where stories that fuel political discontent - and in Hurricane Helene's case, political disinformation - can take root.

The social media platform X has helped fuel a firestorm of conspiracies and politically charged lies, which may have severe implications for the election. Some conspiracy theories, mainly pushed by right-wing actors, claim that FEMA abandoned some parts of North Carolina so that the Biden administration could mine lithium there for electric vehicles; that FEMA ran out of money because the Biden administration has diverted disaster funds to new arriving migrants; and that the government was bulldozing communities to cover up bodies left behind by the storm. Even North Carolina Lt. Gov Mark Robinson - the current Republican gubernatorial nominee - pushed disinformation online about recovery efforts and days later skipped a vote on hurricane relief support for a second time.

Some Black residents in Asheville and Augusta told Capital B that they don't have electricity and elections are the last thing on their minds. Asheville is about 11.2% Black and Augusta is 60% Black. In Georgia, the voter registration deadline has already passed, and in North Carolina, it is just a day away, on Oct. 11. After storms, communities usually have fewer in-person voting polls, and more mail-in ballots are lost or destroyed. And those who originally planned to vote feel like they won't have enough time or access to information to cast an educated vote.

"It is absolutely a reality that voter turnout is going to decline because at this point, everybody is so discombobulated and distracted, who is really going to want to go to a damn poll at this point when you don't have a house?" said Falasha Talbert, a mother of 10 and small-business owner in Augusta.

Typically, Black voter participation in North Carolina and Georgia is above the national average for Black voters, but based on a series of studies, there is an expectation that voting in the impacted regions will decline by around 10%. Augusta's Richmond County was just one of two eastern Georgia counties impacted by the storm that turned blue in 2020. Likewise, Asheville's Buncombe County was the only storm-impacted western North Carolina county outside Charlotte that went Democrat.

As Hurricane Milton causes destruction across Florida, advocates are calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to heed what has already been seen across the region. "It is unreasonable to expect people to focus on registering to vote with multiple storms wreaking havoc," a coalition of community groups wrote to DeSantis.

"People are tired"

However, as right-wing talking points have infiltrated the disaster recovery ecosystem, it may be backfiring for Republicans - particularly because of Project 2025's vision to "defund" FEMA. After storms, elections can become more competitive if a candidate leans more anti-environment.

"FEMA has helped some people, even if they didn't help me," said Thomas, who has been assisting in relief efforts as well as voter registration in Asheville.

"But I wouldn't say that they need to be disbanded just because I didn't get what I needed from them, and [Hurricane Helene] shows the need of FEMA. So, [former President Donald Trump] talking about disbanding FEMA, and me being in a situation where I need FEMA, pushes him further away."

Thomas, 37, is a staunch supporter of Black reparations - the need for which he said has been made only more clear after Hurricane Helene's impact, but has also contributed to a lack of enthusiasm for the upcoming election because no major candidate has a reparations plan.

In Asheville, immediately after the storm hit, Keynon Lake turned his nonprofit group's headquarters into a resource distribution center. Over the week since, he and other community activists have distributed 10 to 15 passenger vans worth of water, food, and cleaning supplies every day to Black and brown victims, including those in nursing homes.

"We are still digging through the rubble and trying to find a way out," said Lake, the founder of My Daddy Taught Me That. Other places routinely hit by hurricanes like Florida and Louisiana have well-oiled response ecosystems, he said, but North Carolina's has been piecemeal.

"Everyone is in survival mode and a mental lull to where it's like, 'I can't even take a shower today, so why would I be talking about next month, about politics. I don't know if people will get back there before the election."

Tomiko Ambrose Murray, a political organizer in Asheville, laid it out plainly.

"We are trying to figure out how to get Black folks to participate in the election; I think there can be a narrative that Black people don't care about climate change, and that's just false," she said.

But, "people here are sleep-deprived, aren't able to work their jobs, don't have money, or maybe possibly having been denied by FEMA, No electricity, no water, you know, those kinds of things, not being able to shower."

"And so people are on the front lines trying to support their communities. Connect people with what they need, and they're exhausted, and it's been like day after day after day. People are tired."

The exhaustion and fatigue last long after the storm and can shape how people view the government for the rest of their lives. Just ask Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Talbert says the fallout of Helene has also made racial inequities more prominent in eastern Georgia. The day after the storm, she said she had to wait hours just to get snacks from the gas station because there were no full service grocery stores within accessible distance of her majority-Black community. As people struggled to get food and gas because of price-gouging, chaos ensued. She witnessed a shooting, as well as a woman that was beginning to give birth in a car because the hospital was inaccessible.

"There was no plan in place for this, and it was obvious," she said. Talbert said she believes the aftermath of the storm, in addition to both Democrats and Republicans not being proactive in the community before the storm, will make it easy to ignore the election.

The false promise of a "climate haven"

As much of western North Carolina slept in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, Hurricane Helene had done the unimaginable by overtopping rivers in the mountain region.

Last year, Asheville ranked second in the country for the most move-ins from new residents compared with residents moving out. A lot of the growth, residents and researchers have explained, was due to the city's designation as a "climate haven" for its mild temperatures, low wildfire and drought risk, and its distance - 300 miles - from the coast, and the storms and sea level rise that brings.

In the area around Asheville, rain swelled the watershed that twists and turns for almost 1,000 square miles, running water off the natural mountainous terrain into the paved and quickly growing city of 95,000. Because the situation developed overnight, Lisa Whittenburg, a mother of three, had no time to evacuate. At more than 400 miles wide, Helene was the third-widest storm in recorded history. Even as the storm battered Florida and Georgia the night before, most residents in the area had no idea of the storm's historic length and ability to turn Asheville into a raging river. There was nowhere for the water to go but up.

After watching the floodwaters rise and swallow the first two floors of her apartment complex in the early hours of Hurricane Helene, Whittenburg accepted her fate: "It got to the point where I had just accepted it, like, 'God it is your will. If I'm not supposed to be here, I won't be.'"

So, by early morning, the family and more than a dozen other residents sat trapped on the third floor of their subsidized housing complex. There wasn't much up there with them outside of an inflatable air mattress that the family brought up in their quick thinking as they evacuated their apartment. One issue: there wasn't a pump. It did not stop Whittenburg's adult daughter Cynia from using all her might to blow up the mattress with her mouth.

"'Mama, we getting out of here,'" Whittenburg recalled her daughter saying.

But Whittenburg wanted to take her chances on the roof. She didn't know what was in the floodwaters, which are known to be full of toxins, sewage, and bacteria, and she thought to herself, "I'm gonna sink, right?" So, she waited, even as the waters threw a tractor-trailer into her apartment complex and the stilts it stood on began to crack.

Two weeks later, she is still fighting for more concrete answers from FEMA. She applied for funding and said she was approved, but the total amount and details have been confusing. Whittenburg said she no longer has anywhere to stay with electricity in the area. Sleeping or staying in her apartment, filled with muck and debris, is akin to staying in "quick sand."

"I just need to be somewhere where things are functioning," Whittenburg explained as she was packing up to leave Asheville to stay with her sister in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday. "People like me don't have anything. ... I've never had to do nothing like this before."


This story was originally produced by Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney of Capital B News as part of the Rural News Network, an initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), supporting more than 475 independent, nonprofit news organizations.