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Since December 28th, 2019 the island of Puerto Rico has been affected by a series of hundreds of small earthquakes, which culminated in a powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake on the morning of Tuesday, January 7th (Source: https://www.usgs.gov/news/magnitude-64-earthquake-puerto-rico) This Tuesday Earthquake caused widespread damage to infrastructure in a region that is still recovering from the effects of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, leaving more than 2,000 people in shelters, nearly 1 million without power and hundreds of thousands without water as of Thursday January 9th.

The NASA Earth Applied Sciences Disasters Program has activated a “Tier 1” response to the earthquakes in Puerto Rico. As part of this response the program is in contact with federal agencies leading the response effort including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide NASA Earth-observing data in support of the response and recovery for this disaster.