When making the decision to borrow money, do you turn to friends and family for financial help, or do you go to a financial institution like a bank or credit card company?
On a country-to-country basis, this choice often depends on a mix of various factors, including the availability of financial services, financial literacy, and the cultural approach to the very concept of lending itself.
Hurricane Maria made landfall near the city of Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, at around 6:15 am Wednesday, according to the National Hurricane Center, battering the densely populated eastern side of the island with torrential rains and 155 mph gusts as hundreds of thousands of people hunkered down in one of the island's 500 storm shelters in hopes of riding out the second major hurricane to impact the island within two weeks.
Category 4 Maria slammed the island with winds of 155 mph, just 2 mph short of category 5 status.
In less than two days, Hurricane Maria has strengthened from a tropical storm to a powerful category five hurricane, dubbed in no uncertain terms as "catastrophic" by the NHC. Though it has been downgraded to a category 4 overnight, the storm made landfall on the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, leaving it utterly “devastated,” according to the island’s prime minister.
"We're just waiting for daybreak to do an assessment of the damage," Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit told CNN's Rosemary Church.
As much of Florida is left flooded and without power from this weekend's hurricane, the damage across much of the Caribbean goes well beyond water damage and downed power lines with many describing the devastation left by Irma as "end-of-the-world times." As one resident of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands told the Washington Post, "it was beyond rough times, it was end-of-the-world times...everything normal to us has been destroyed."
Irma is the kind of storm where you get thousands of lives lost. This is not going to be the big slow-motion flood like Harvey - this is a real, honest-to-God hurricane.
- Chuck Watson, disaster modeler with Enki Research