The Truth about Puerto Rico

The effort to Katrina Trump with Marie continues apace.

I know Trump fed his haters, yesterday morning on Twitter:

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.
...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They....
...want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

That's aggravating, when people are suffering, but should it be called "demented" and "racist"? I can see why a Trump hater would jump at an opportunity to frame "They" as Puerto Ricans in general and, in addition, to see Puerto Ricans as a racial group being subjected to disrespect because of race. But that's a leap beyond Trump's text. And yet, if the text supports that leap, one might say Trump intended to cause his followers to make racist inferences.

This morning I watched George Stuffenenvelopes and his henchpeople on ABC "This Week" all but claim that Donald Trump personally whipped up Hurricane Maria and send it rampaging over Puerto Rico, and was certainly negligent in his handling of the rescue of the island (there was a token conservative hold out, but they cut him off repeatedly).

Here is the truth of the situation. The entire network of civilization that we rely on in this day and age has been blown away on an island with 3.4 million people, and the restoration is going to be difficult and time consuming because all the means we count on to restore services have been damaged and destroyed as well. For all practical purposes, Puerto Rico needs to be re-raised to the 20th, let alone the 21st, century: U.S. Military on Puerto Rico: “The Problem is Distribution” and Here's Why:

Col. Valle is a firsthand witness of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) response supporting FEMA in Puerto Rico, and as a Puerto Rican himself with family members living in the devastation, his passion for the people is second to none. “It’s just not true,” Col. Valle says of the major disconnect today between the perception of a lack of response from Washington verses what is really going on on the ground. “I have family here. My parents’ home is here. My uncles, aunts, cousins, are all here. As a Puerto Rican, I can tell you that the problem has nothing to do with the U.S. military, FEMA, or the DoD.”

“The aid is getting to Puerto Rico. The problem is distribution. The federal government has sent us a lot of help; moving those supplies, in particular, fuel, is the issue right now,” says Col. Valle. Until power can be restored, generators are critical for hospitals and shelter facilities and more. But, and it’s a big but, they can’t get the fuel to run the generators.

They have the generators, water, food, medicine, and fuel on the ground, yet the supplies are not moving across the island as quickly as they’re needed.

“It’s a lack of drivers for the transport trucks, the 18 wheelers. Supplies we have. Trucks we have. There are ships full of supplies, backed up in the ports, waiting to have a vehicle to unload into. However, only 20% of the truck drivers show up to work. These are private citizens in Puerto Rico, paid by companies that are contracted by the government,” says Col. Valle.

Put another way, 80% of truck drivers do not show up to work, and yet again, it’s important to understand why.

There have been rumors that the truckers are on strike, but . . .

“There should be zero blame on the drivers. They can’t get to work, the infrastructure is destroyed, they can’t get fuel themselves, and they can’t call us for help because there’s no communication. The will of the people of Puerto Rico is off the charts. The truck drivers have families to take care of, many of them have no food or water. They have to take care of their family’s needs before they go off to work, and once they do go, they can’t call home,” explains Col. Valle.

It’s a dilemma with dependent conditions. The citizens need fuel and supplies brought in by relief efforts. The truck drivers who move the fuel and supplies from ports and airstrips need fuel and traversable roads—and before anything else they need supplies for their own families.

One of the guys I was fishing with the other day works in the Pentagon, and is currently involved in the Puerto Rican relief. He said much the same, the problem is that none of the infrastructure is working. The relief is there, but with everything depending of everything else, it's a matter of prioritizing the most important steps that will make the others possible.

Linked by Evi L. Bloggerlady  in "San Juan's Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz: What we've got here is failure to communicate..."