Example: “Only 11 of the island’s 69 hospitals had fuel or power as of Tuesday, according the U.S. Department of Defense. Forty-four percent of Puerto Rico was without drinking water.”
“Since there’s no electricity, they have to use emergency generators, and basically all of them work with diesel…"
Minimal functioning. It describes no adequate power for operating rooms, eg. The above may be improved since. It’s a 6 day old report.
But see how “operational” means so little, in itself? That’s spin.
And if 1.5 million are without drinking water, how far do 35000 water bottles go?
"“This is not something a president should be doing or can do,” said Larry McDonald, head of the U.S. macro strategies at ACG Analytics. “It’s just noise, and it’s pretty far removed from reality.”
“This is not a dictatorship. We have bankruptcy judges and the rule of law,” McDonald said. “But it is scaring the bond market.”
Municipal bond insurers also saw their stocks fall. Shares of MBIA, Ambac Financial and Assured Guaranty declined 8.8 percent, 4.5 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively."
The big problem I have with these statistics is that, again, they lack important context. Merely stating that 55% of people do not have potable water, or that 95% of the island does not have electricity make for great sound bites, but they ignore the reality of the devastation as well as the resources available to get everything up and running again.
Case in point:
Even if we could have dispatched 100% of resources right on day 1 (optimal situation), how quickly would everything have been repaired?
Is #1 even realistic?
How many resources were actually available? It’s easy to say that we should have done more, but I don’t think a single person here knows exactly what we had at our disposal prior to Maria hitting PR.
@fractalmstr Do you feel the administration is doing a good job at not only providing the resources to the very best of their abilities and in the timeliest of fashions? And do you think they are providing that context that you see as so important?
"A spokesperson for FEMA told me Tuesday that the agency had approved $35 million in public and individual assistance grants for the island. Meanwhile, FEMA has approved $691 million in grants to Irma victims in Florida and has sent $323 million to Texas communities recovering from Harvey.
"Puerto Rico is a US territory and not a state, so its residents don’t pay federal income tax unless they work for the US government. Even so, workers there pay the majority of federal taxes that Americans on the mainland pay — payroll taxes, social security taxes, business taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes and so on.
The recent economic crisis on the island has put a huge dent in the federal tax revenue collected from Puerto Rico, but it still added up to $3.6 billion in fiscal year 2016. That’s not much less than some states where residents do pay income tax: Vermont and Wyoming paid $4.5 billion in federal taxes that year."
" The federal government doesn’t operate business transactions with each state, giving the best services to the states that pay the most taxes. That’s not how the government works.
The Stafford Act, which governs federal response to major disasters, says the government must provide help to Puerto Rico like it would to any other state. It doesn’t say that help should be based on the state’s financial health. If it did, that would mean the government should give less help to Illinois after a disaster because the state is nearly bankrupt.
Nor does it say disaster relief depends on how much it puts the budget “out of whack,” in Trump’s words. After all, the majority of states get more back from the federal government than they pay in taxes. One of them is Louisiana, where the federal government spent $9.9 billion rebuilding after Katrina. Nobody complained about the cost. In fact, President George W. Bush was criticized for not doing more for Katrina victims."
My comments have more to do with the optics than what has been accomplished. Telling people they haven’t suffered a real tragedy when they may be listening to their baby cry because they can’t get her formula or walking hours to try to get insulin for their mother is NOT helpful. Neither is playfully tossing rolls of paper towels into the crowd while bragging about what a great job you’ve been doing while over 3 million people have been without power for 2 weeks.
What do people do when they don’t have safe water to drink? They either die of thirst or they drink unsafe water. Thank god PR apparently doesn’t have cholera or we’d have an epidemic on our hands.
3.5 weeks later, Puerto Rico still faces horrible conditions. 91% still without power.
According to a FEMA report, nearly 40 percent of Puerto Ricans have no access to clean drinking water. The situation is so dire that some residents are attempting to get water from polluted, contaminated and toxic sources.
“There are reports of residents obtaining, or trying to obtain, drinking water from wells at hazardous waste ‘Superfund’ sites in Puerto Rico,” the Environmental Protection Agency notes in a press release cited by Reuters.
“Nearly three weeks after landing in Puerto Rico to support those affected by Hurricane Maria, Washington, D.C.-based chef José Andrés is feeding people in the most remote areas of the island. With his disaster relief nonprofit World Central Kitchen, Andrés has made it his mission to deliver sandwiches and hot meals to as many people as possible, and now, Andrés announced on Twitter, his team of chef partners and volunteers is capable of serving 97,000 meals per day.”
"Andrés has also visited the National Guard, who he says his team is feeding, despite the federal government’s lack of support for his efforts. (He says he’s asked for access to helicopters and other assistance to no avail.) "
Officials (not the right ones IMO) are being charged in Flint for maiming and killing people. This should happen in Puerto Rico too and it should go as high as possible.
One of the comments on the article above mentions that 70% of the island’s solar power survived the hurricane. This man’s did, but it says he is not near the coast. Maybe that’s key.
Wind turbines cannot operate at wind speeds above 55 mph and must be shut down. Turbine farms in TX fared surprisingly well during Harvey. Not so much in PR.
@doschicos Referring to your comment in #124, in light of the recent issue with Whitefish Energy do you still not see how the level of corruption is relevant? Obviously, this contract could have been awarded legitimately but if you have ever lived in countries with high levels of corruption, surely you can see why it makes rebuilding difficult.
@yearstogo Corruption is always a serious concern. In this case are you referring to corruption in Puerto Rico or the United States? I ask because of Whitefish’s link to US Interior Secretary Zinke.
That aside, there were some valid points made regarding Whitefish. They’re working for no money up front, which is incredibly expensive and risky for small companies to do. They have specific expertise with mountainous and difficult terrain. And they’re also working off helicopters, which is just freaking cool and crazy if anybody’s seen pictures (and adds to the initial cost they’re shouldering).
For a cash-strapped economy like PR, getting their electrical grid fixed on a “work now pay later” basis must be quite attractive. I’m in sales myself, and I’ve seen consulting gigs to the more expensive “pay at the end” vendor vs the cheaper “pay up front” vendor, so it happens for various reasons and different vendors follow different models for their own reasons as well.
I would like to see more detail on why they were chosen, but I’m not entirely in the camp that thinks there’s definitely corruption involved.
@yearstogo My point all along has been on getting disaster relief in there quickly, timely, and in sufficient levels. Using PR’s economic history, which is very complicated, as an excuse for inaction is ridiculous. The resources committed from the get go were inefficient. Doesn’t matter what the PR government has or hasn’t done. The people were and are suffering.
To me, if anything based on the little I’ve heard, it is reminiscent to Halliburton/Iraq contracts. Interesting to see whose friends benefit.
When I first heard that the firm was from Whitefish, I feared that Richard Spencer might be involved. That is where his parents live and where he had planned to have an anti-Semetic march a few months ago.
In better news, Elon Musk has brought solar cells to a children’s hospital in Puerto Rico:
Good for Elon. He said he could do it and he is following up. Tesla can learn a few things from such rapid battery/panel deployments, so it sounds like a win win thing.
Whitefish is a two-person company. Do both people have experience in mountainous terrain, or just one of them? If they’re hiring subcontractors, why would we think they had amazing expertise in hiring subcontractors?
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