Miguel Román describes spotting an unexplained, island-wide blackout in Puerto Rico's Black Marble nighttime data in September 2016, a year before Hurricane Maria, which turned out to be an early warning sign of a fragile power grid. After Maria and Irma hit, the small curiosity-driven mapping project became a disaster-response tool, used by federal agencies to track which communities had power and for how long during recovery.
- 01
Román first noticed Puerto Rico's lights disappear on September 20, 2016, traced to a fire at the Aguirre power plant in Guayama.
- 02
NASA's disaster response team used nighttime maps to brief Army Northern Command on where to send diesel generators, including an estimate that a town like Barranquitas had been without power for 60 days based on DOE reports.
- 03
The federal search and rescue capacity force activated for Puerto Rico had not been used since Hurricane Katrina.
- 04
Eight years later, the coffee-growing Adjuntas region shows up in Black Marble data as consistently lit during outages because it is now fully electrified with local solar power.
810 words · auto-generated from the episode video
22:15things that I wanted to ask you about was the big Puerto Rico paper. So, first of all, this must have been um personally a very big deal for you, right? Um how'd you how' you come across like doing this? Yeah. So I remember the day I was a gerter have my monitor 2016 September 20 the first major outage like of an entire area was a power outage that happened at the Agira power plant in Guayama that day. And with this
22:56is early black marble we were still manually downloading data. No, we weren't in the cloud like and I put Puerto Rico on just like I do every day. I drink my cafeito and I'm going to look at Puerto Rico and I had to look three times. >> And my hard job because it had disappeared. >> Yeah. And this is just after the hurricane. >> Before the hurricane. A year before the hurricane. >> Oh, before the hurricane. >> That was kind of a warning sign. >> Interesting. as the electricity system of Puerto Rico was already very vulnerable and sending us an early signal of what became the largest power outage in Puerto Rico in US history at the time which is hurricane Irma and
23:38Maria that followed each other within two weeks and the project changed forever after that. We knew what was going on. We weren't, you know, our head didn't skip at that time and rather than having a concern, it was, you know, we had a sense of urgency as an agency, not just our team. I mean, I remember being part of NASA's disaster response coordination team. We were in meetings at the White House with all our partners and other federal agencies helping understand the situation in Puerto Rico from us. >> And
24:19everything we had done prior to this was curiositydriven. It was understanding the night, understanding how to protect the night. You know, the natural patrimony that is to be able to have dark skies. Puerto Rico changed that. We we started asking different questions because of this and it wasn't not enough to just coming up with a power outage map and putting it in the front cover of Washington Post. We used to do that a lot. >> Yeah. >> But after this it wasn't enough. We we had to stay and monitor which communities were still without power for
25:00how long. And the entire project became a focus on recovery and resilience. And yeah, so we were I remember being on in calls with the army nin command in Puerto Rico and they were moving diesel power generators around the island and I got a call from a captain like sir like we're going to move we want to go to this town power. >> Uhhuh. And I was like, "Yeah, they've been without power for 60 days based on the DOE report and our nighttime nets." And we we were part of the search capacity force, the federalwide search capacity for that had not been activated since Katrina.
25:40>> Wow. >> Nowadays, there were there were folks there were a lot of female folks in Puerto Rico eating MREs for weeks. And you know, and that taught us something very important because we were here, we were in DC. It taught us that you can look at all the stuff from space, but if you can't connect with those communities and people with that knowledge, >> and that's where Black Marble evolved thanks to Puerto Rico because we began to realize that >> you can't do Earth action, Earth science to action without involving the local expertise. And you know at the time like I've grown now you know since then it's been nine
26:22years. >> Yeah. It it really it that personal connection at the time was very hard. But now it I've sort of seen how much we've learned from from these events and the world has learned. You know, the the world has become more resilient in a way because we know what happens when you have these large scale events and what how can that impact centralized electricities and you go to Puerto Rico, everybody has, you know, domestically, you know, every home now has batteries and solar power. >> Nice.
27:02>> Right. And so, and there was both local investment, federal investment going into restoring that. And you can see that in the in the data too, >> right? Really? >> Yeah. You can see that you see mount like the coffee grown mountain region of Puerto Rico, Alontas, they're they're now fully electrified with solar >> and every time there's an outlet, they're still on. >> They're still on. >> And you can see that in our anomaly course >> years later, eight years later.
Remote SensingEarth ObservationEnergy AccessOpen Data