Saturday, April 28, 2018

Puerto Rico Suffers While Federal Government Fails

You rarely hear news about disaster recovery in Puerto Rico anymore though you may have heard about the 2 day power outage on the island recently. Given the dearth of coverage you could be forgiven for believing that all is well but you’d be wrong. In fact between 10% and 20% of the population is still without power a full seven months since hurricane Maria devastated the island. Many homes are still not in livable condition and yet they’ll be eligible for foreclosure starting May 18.

Puerto Rico is an American territory with a population of over 3.3 million United States citizens, that’s more than the population of entire states of Iowa, Utah, Mississippi and 17 other states. Puerto Rico is about the same size and population as Connecticut.

It’s nearly hurricane season again and tens of thousands of the island’s residents are essentially homeless and living in shelters or doubling up with family and friends. The electrical grid is incomplete and unstable as evidenced by the recent two day island-wide outage. This is on top of rolling blackouts lasting anywhere from 1 to 16 hours at a time.

While the president made excuses immediately after hurricane Maria last year that it’s difficult to provide assistance because “This is an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water,” that’s no longer an acceptable excuse if it ever was.

Back in January the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) stopped providing water and food aid even though tens of thousands are will without access to safe drinking water let alone running water. The situation is so bad that thousands of people are still getting their water from springs that aren’t officially tested for contamination.

In order to protect their community’s health it has become a project at Maricao high school students to test water are community sites daily and put up warning signs with recommended treatment precautions. The project started when water activist Steve Tamar offered his citizen-science training at Maricao High School in western Puerto Rico this past October. He expected perhaps a dozen students, instead, the sweltering hot auditorium was packed with teenagers looking to help test the island’s water. Eventually the whole school got involved one way or another with teachers incorporating the theme of water testing into their curriculum.

Earlier this year Congress allocated $2 billion to the recovery effort but the federal government has yet to make any of that available to Puerto Rico. While that sounds like a lot of money, consider that Puerto Rico asked for $17 billion just to restore the electric grid. Florida citrus growers got $2.3 billion in hurricane recovery assistance so you can see the disproportionate allocation of assistance.

Between November 2017 and January 2018 Puerto Rico’s health department recorded triple the number of calls to their suicide hotline from those who had already attempted suicide. Mental health workers are concerned about widespread post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the effects of the upcoming hurricane season.

The fact that recovery in Puerto Rico still lags and is underfunded is a failure of the federal government. The fact that we as citizens are mostly unaware of the lag in recovery and its cause is a failure of our national news media. It is incumbent on us as citizens to hold both our government officials and our media accountable.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 27, 2018

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