Puerto Rico, a place to nearly 3.5 million people, continues largely crushed by Hurricane Maria, the Category 4 hurricane that has claimed 24 lives in Puerto Rico single and has left almost the totality of the US territory without electricity and almost half of all citizens without potable water.
Because of the damage was done to the island’s connections infrastructure, more than 90 percent of Puerto Rico’s cell towers stayed offline and residents are unable to communicate friends and relatives. And notwithstanding the occasional tweet from President Donald Trump declaring Washington is working to provide aid, the department has not yet said whether it will help repair Puerto Rico’s infrastructure. Facebook published earlier this week that it was giving a connectivity team to Puerto Rico, as well as a $1.5 million donation, to help get the land back on online.
Providing connectivity to areas attacked by natural disasters has been one of the core purposes of Loon since its inception in 2011. The unit has run pilot programs in New Zealand and Brazil, and it’s also partnered with a number of countries, including Indonesia and Sri Lanka, to deploy LTE utilizing its signature air balloons. However, it seems that Loon has never attempted to provide emergency connectivity at the scale Puerto Rico requires. It’s unclear to what extent Loon may be able to assist the island, and if its technology is competent of doing so in a way as meaningful as the necessary financial and infrastructural aid the US government could provide.
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