A decaying structure in a neighborhood somewhere west of Old San Juan. Much of Puerto Rico’s problems stem from an existing debt of $72 billion with a 45% poverty rate. Taking a direct hit from a category 4 hurricane, which caused an estimated $50 billion in damages, didn’t help. Photo by Thomas McKenzie

Finally. As in, *finally* Thomas McKenzie’s and my schedules lined-up so we could talk about his back-to-back public information officer deployments for Hurricane Harvey, in Texas, and Hurricane Maria, in Puerto Rico, which I teased to you all last month here on the blog. Thomas and I spent a few minutes here (~28) talking about what he experienced during these hurricane responses as a public information officer and the lessons learned from both. He spent about two months on the road for these incidents, so we really could have done *hours* of talking about it (we have, off mic – but not here). Enjoy:

Paul and I hope to do more of these podcasts in the future, for long-form topics that just can’t be condensed into 500-1000 typed words. Bear with us as we become more professional within the medium!