Puerto Rico Deaths Spike, but Few Are Attributed to Hurricane

PONCE, P.R. — Almost two months after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, there were more signs of how unsettled the situation remains here and how grievous the toll of the storm was.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said that it was finalizing extraordinary plans to fly about 3,000 residents of Puerto Rico still living in shelters to New York and Florida.

“Transportation assistance is something that I don’t think we have done previously,” Will Booher, a FEMA spokesman, said. “But this is unique to what’s going on in Puerto Rico.” The agency said the relief effort was being undertaken at the request of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.

FEMA regularly finds housing for hurricane victims, often at hotels or motels nearby. But because there is so little available lodging on the island, and no easy way to get people from shelters to safe housing, the agency is arranging charter flights for residents, beginning with those still in shelters.

On Wednesday, Puerto Rico officials, facing increasing questions about the accuracy of the official death toll from the storm, acknowledged for the first time that 472 more people died this September compared with the same month last year. The storm made landfall on Sept. 20. The government’s official death toll is 55.

The numbers confirmed what had been speculated for weeks: After the waters receded and the roads were cleared, people here continued to die at rates far beyond normal.

As temperatures frequently rose above 90 degrees, the lack of power in nursing homes, private houses and hospitals hit the elderly particularly hard. Soaring temperatures accelerated the deaths of people who were already seriously ill. Ambulances could not arrive, medicines ran out and oxygen tanks that ran on electricity were useless, several funeral directors said.

Even with the increase in mortality in the weeks after Hurricane Maria, authorities insisted that the official death toll remained at 55: 20 direct deaths; 31 indirect deaths, such as suicides; and four more from leptospirosis, a waterborne bacterial disease.

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