Nearly two years after Hurricane Maria devastated most of Puerto Rico, uprooting many and ravaging much of the island’s infrastructure, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking for a contractor to comprehensively analyze and identify deaths that were directly and indirectly connected to the storm.
The agency is particularly interested in investigating how failures across Puerto Rico’s buildings and building systems attributed to deaths associated with the Category 5 hurricane.
“The information provided by the contractor will be essential in the development of recommendations to improve mortality surveillance and attribution, and ultimately, the safety and structural integrity of buildings in the United States,” agency officials said in a solicitation published Friday.
As the strongest hurricane to hit the island in nearly a century, Maria affected the majority of the island’s population in some capacity, but details around its true impact were not clear in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Though the governor originally and controversially reported that only 64 people died in connection to the hurricane, the government of Puerto Rico revised the official death count to 2,975 in Aug. 2018, making the storm one of the deadliest in American history.
Last year, NIST’s director stood up a national construction safety team—which investigate building failures—to perform a technical investigation of the storm and its impact on the ..
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