Since the early days after Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017, the debate over the death toll has raged. Initial reports that fewer than 100 people had died were seized upon by the Trump administration, but they belied the scope of the devastation. The storm left the island without electricity for months, hospitals and other key infrastructure shuttered, roads unpassable and pharmacies closed.
In June, Caribbean News Director Mike Weissenstein in Havana forged a partnership with Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism (known by its Spanish initials CPI) and U.S.-based news site Quartz to undertake the most comprehensive list to date of Puerto Ricans who died in the wake of the storm.
For the project, Weissenstein, San Juan newswoman Danica Coto, Washington-based data journalist Larry Fenn, New York-based reporter Claudia Torrens, Miami-based reporter Gisela Salomon, Washington-based reporters Luis Alonso and Ben Fox, as well as senior Havana-based producer Chris Gillette, Havana photographer Ramon Espinosa, Santo Domingo reporter Ezequiel Lopez Blanco, Mexico-based digital producer Dario Lopez, New York-based motion graphics producer Peter Hamlin and enterprise editor Raghuram Vadarevu, based in Phoenix, share the Best of the Week award-
Telling the stories, one by one in multiple formats, of the 487 deaths documented in the project.
Over three months, AP staff across the U.S. and the Caribbean dedicated long hours to the project. Fenn worked with our partners to match hundreds of tips to a database of death certificates released after a lawsuit by the CPI against the Puerto Rican government. Torrens, Alonso and Fox, who was then a Caribbean-focused news manager in Miami, worked with the team interviewing hundreds of families with a questionnaire based on the criteria the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention use to determine if a death is indirectly disaster related.
Gillette and Espinosa joined reporters interviewing victims’ families and authorities in Puerto Rico to produce a multiformat piece that linked deaths to government inaction and poor decision-making. Lopez turned the work into a wrenching online video and Vadarevu produced a series of features that gave the work a vibrant presence online. Lopez Blanco spent days on the unromantic but essential task of copy-editing hundreds of accounts of victims’ final days.
Lady Diana Torres, left, and her daughter, Paula Nicole Lopez, pose in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, Sept. 5, 2018, with photos of their late husband and father, Orlando Lopez Martinez. Lopez, who died at age 48 on Oct. 10, 2017, was a dialysis patient. The center where he received dialysis shut down after Hurricane Maria, and after missing some treatments over more than a week, the center rationed Lopez's treatment, say friends and family. The official cause of death was a heart attack brought on by kidney disease.
AP Photo / Ramon Espinosa
In Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, June 7, 2018, Nerybelle Perez holds a picture of her father, World War II veteran Efrain Perez, who died inside an ambulance after being turned away from the largest public hospital when it had no electricity or water, days after Hurricane Maria hit the island. Researchers from George Washington University hired by Puerto Rico's government estimated in August 2018 that 2,975 people had died because of Maria in the six months after landfall, a number Puerto Rico accepted as official.
AP Photo / Carlos Giusti
Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello speaks in San Juan, Aug. 28, 2018, during a news conference on the number of estimated deaths in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Rossello has raised the island's official death toll from Maria from 64 to 2,975 after an independent study by George Washington University found that the number of people who succumbed after the storm had been severely undercounted.
AP Photo / Carlos Giusti
Three containers for holding corpses, left, are parked outside the Institute of Forensic Science in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Oct. 2, 2017, brought in for extra capacity in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. A spokesman for the institute confirmed that the facility no longer had enough space to store bodies, and that several hospital morgues were also full.
AP Photo / Carlos Giusti
Gloria Rosado Ortiz poses with an image of her late husband, Ernesto Curiel, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Sept. 4, 2018. Curiel, a 60-year-old who had heart problems and diabetes, walked 10 flights of stairs to the ground floor of his condominium twice a day to get insulin from a refrigerator powered by a generator after Hurricane Maria hit. On Oct. 29, 2017 he died of a heart attack. “He was in a fragile state, but not so fragile that he’d only last a month after the hurricane,” said Ortiz.
AP Photo / Ramon Espinosa
Those results were to be published on the anniversary of the storm, but when President Donald Trump tweeted that only dozens died, and reports of thousands of people dead were politically motivated false news, the partners launched a 24-hour rush to get the project out online. One day after the president’s remarks, the AP and its partners published text stories, an interactive database, websites in English and Spanish and compelling photos and video telling, one by one, the stories of the 487 deaths documented in the project.
The collaboration made AP part owner of one of the most important pieces of data in the debate over the death toll in Hurricane Maria, and was widely cited in TV, websites and in print around the world. One of the Washington Post’s lead Puerto Rico reporters tweeted: “THIS is a big deal.” And Walter Robinson, former head of the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative team commented: “What extraordinary, painstaking, thorough reporting … Wow!”
The judges could not agree more, and for their months of hard work, the all-format team from Latin America and the United States wins the inaugural Best of the Week competition.