Revisiting the Demography of Disaster: Population Estimates After Hurricane Maria

Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico, in September 2017, causing economic damages and affecting the population by increasing temporarily increasing mortality and outgoing passenger flow. Because of the disruption in the migration flows, the volatility of this time series we must approach the production of population estimates, projections and forecasts carefully. Given that population estimates have been difficult to produce for Puerto Rico before Hurricane Maria and even more challenging following this disaster, this paper proposes an application of the demographic balancing equation using administrative records to produce population estimates on a monthly basis for Puerto Rico. A combination of data from: (1) monthly counts for deaths and births obtained from the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics Systems, (2) passenger flow data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and (3) baseline census counts. I employ this approach to produce monthly estimates of the population for Puerto Rico, and use 2010 Census counts to assess the accuracy of the model. According to the 2010 decennial census, the population of Puerto Rico was 3,725,789 people; by employing the demographic balancing equation approach, the population was estimated to be 3,669,676 people in April 1, 2010. Using this model, I find that after Hurricane Maria, the population of Puerto Rico reached less than 3 million persons in December 2017 (2.97 million). The total population went back to over 3.0 million by January 2018 with an estimated population of 3.02 million people on September 2018.