"Y no quedó nada, nada de la casa, todo salió volando" (And there was nothing left, nothing of the house, everything flew away): a critical medical ecological perspective on the lived experience of hurricane María in Puerto Rico.

BACKGROUND: Ecological disasters create dramatic changes as man-made and natural ecosystems adapt to their effects. In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and María devastated Puerto Rico. Public focus after such traumatic ecological events often neglects pre-existing community dynamics, heterogeneity of lived experience, and complexity of decision-making in the disaster context. We intended to better understand the lived experience of this ecological trauma in communities across ecosystems in Puerto Rico and among those displaced to Florida. METHOD: We used the Critical Medical Ecological (CME) framework to assess the relative contribution of ecological dimensions on lived experience across community levels and time. We used qualitative methods with emic coding and etic mapping of salient constructs to the ecological model. In total, 96 people participated in 23 discussion encounters. Two people coded interviews in Spanish using Dedoose. We identified common themes in sequential order mapped to elements of the CME to approximate the participants' temporal experience. RESULTS: Codes applied to the period of the hurricane's landfall, traverse, and exit were markedly distinct from the other two periods (before and after) examined in this study: the experience of the hurricane's strike was highly personal and, at this level, reflected a mix of sociocultural, biological, and abiotic factors. After the hurricanes, social and community factors re-emerged while new risks and conditions arose that were biological (e.g., leptospirosis, no food or water) or abiotic (e.g., unusable roads/bridges, structures destroyed), but created ongoing stressors and social needs for communities. As we found, the dynamics of the social and household landscape sometimes involved the decision to leave Puerto Rico altogether, or forced people to continually face and adapt to the ongoing collapse in basic services that were only slowly and differentially restored. CONCLUSION: Lived experience across each stage of the hurricanes differed substantially from one another. Communities disrupted by ecological disaster are also frequently entangled within global economic and political histories and dependencies that could preclude recovery. Island nations are especially vulnerable to both climate-induced ecological change and political-economic exploitation. The ongoing health effect of the hurricane remains palpable in many communities of Puerto Rico and among the diaspora in Florida.

Conducting an immersive community-based assessment of post-hurricane experience among Puerto Ricans: lived experience of medical ecology in an environmental disaster and migration.

BACKGROUND: Two devastating sequential hurricanes impacted Puerto Rico during September of 2017. The hurricanes were traumatic and created social and ecological upheaval throughout Puerto Rico, and subsequently in communities of Central Florida where affected Puerto Ricans migrated. The 2017 hurricane season exposed and exacerbated previous long-standing socio-political, economic, environmental, and health crises, generating a humanitarian emergency in the country. The consequences of these human-ecological disasters destroyed much of Puerto Rico's residential and environmental infrastructure, displacing thousands of people and resulting in an unprecedented migration to the United States. We report on the lived experience of the investigator team and partnership in conducting community-based formative research subsequent to this disaster, research that aimed to identify salient issues relating to the impact of Hurricanes Irma and María on Puerto Rican communities both in Puerto Rico and in Central Florida. DISCUSSION: The challenges faced during the conduct of this research include but are not limited to (1) emotional distress of participants and team members, (2) access to affected populations, and (3) precarious environmental factors, such as unstable infrastructure. To address these challenges, the researchers applied a Critical Medical Ecological paradigm along with qualitative methods to assist constructing explanatory models while obtaining internally-valid (from the community perspective), cathartic narrative accounts of the lived experience of hurricane survivors. The experience of the research team may help inform other investigators conducting applied research during a humanitarian crisis. CONCLUSION: Lessons learned in this research included: (1) usefulness of applying the Critical Medical Ecological model in the development of the project, (2) incorporating participation and methods that prioritize authenticity, (3) understanding the trauma experience and using study methods sensitive to it, and (4) innovating with best approaches to conduct the study given the challenges in post-hurricane Puerto Rico. These lessons could provide new insights on how to conduct in-depth participatory health research with community members who have been traumatized and - often - displaced. This research also demonstrates the value of pre-existing partnerships, critical consciousness in the field team, and medical ecological modeling as experiential for organizing complex, inter-related, multi-level variables that explain community and individual impact of environmental disasters.