Hurricanes Jose, Katia, and Maria

[GreyhoundFan]

"After Maria, José Andrés and his team have served more meals in Puerto Rico than the Red Cross"

Spoiler

A week ago, President Trump issued a warning on Twitter: He could not keep the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the military and other first responders in Puerto Rico forever, he wrote. His tweet was quickly viewed by some as a threat that the government might abandon its own territory before the island could recover from the devastating blow delivered by Hurricane Maria in mid-September.

On Tuesday, chef and restaurateur José Andrés said his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, and the hundreds who have volunteered to help it, would keep feeding Puerto Ricans until the locals could again take care of themselves, which could take awhile. According to FEMA, only 14 percent of the island has electricity, and many areas still have no drinking water or access to fresh food.

“When we establish contact with a community, we maintain that contact,” Andrés said during a phone interview from San Juan. “When we go to a place, we take care of that place until we feel it has the right conditions to sustain itself. That’s what a relief organization should be.”

Andrés landed in Puerto Rico on Sept. 25 and immediately started working with chef José Enrique, whose eponymous San Juan restaurant was already preparing batches of sancocho — a Puerto Rican beef stew — for hungry residents. In their first couple of days together, the chefs produced enough food to feed 1,000 or 2,000 people. Within a week of Andrés’s appearance on the island, their numbers skyrocketed to 25,000 meals per day, now including sandwiches and paella.

Nearly a month after Maria, Andrés, World Central Kitchen and volunteers have reached a milestone in their #chefsforpuertorico campaign: As of Tuesday, they’ve prepared and delivered a million meals to residents. As a point of comparison, the American Red Cross has served more than 540,000 meals and snacks (and distributed more than 534,000 relief supplies) in the weeks since hurricanes Irma and Maria struck Puerto Rico, according to a spokeswoman for the organization.

FEMA has provided more than 14 million meals and 11 million liters of water in all 78 municipalities in Puerto Rico, said spokesman Dan Stoneking. That number includes meals provided by state, local and volunteer organizations, such as World Central Kitchen, which FEMA has helped fund. Many of FEMA’s meals are military and civilian MREs, or meals ready to eat, which do not include hot food.

...

How Andrés and crew have pulled off this feat is a story that’s difficult to piece together on a cellphone call to Puerto Rico, where service remains spotty and the chef remains too swamped to walk a reporter through all the complex logistics of feeding an island with little gas, electricity or transportation. The chef said it started with Enrique’s restaurant and has now expanded to 15 kitchens, including the Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan, where the majority of the meals are prepared. Between 450 and 500 volunteers are involved daily.

In fact, after Andrés navigated Houston’s flooded streets to help feed the city following Hurricane Harvey, he learned an important lesson about relief operations: You need a facility with a large-capacity kitchen to prepare meals on a massive scale; otherwise you’ll never quiet a city’s hunger pains following a disaster. In Houston, Andrés worked at the downtown convention center. But in Puerto Rico, he initially couldn’t get access to the coliseum.

“First, I wanted to come to the coliseo, where I am right now, because I was looking for the biggest kitchen, and they told me, ‘No way, José,'” Andrés recalled, now laughing at the story. A week later, however, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló and first lady Beatriz Areizaga helped the chef secure access to the coliseum, where cooks now prepare more than 60,000 meals a day.

...

Assistance has come from a variety of sources, Andrés said. Donors, large and small, have contributed millions of dollars to World Central Kitchen. Goya Foods loaned WCK its helicopter to fly food into remote regions in the mountains. (The helicopter also helped crews locate a working kitchen, which is now one of the 15 spots for meal preparation.) Even Homeland Security has assisted with food distribution, Andrés said, after the agency helped the chef locate a missing person.

“I became friends with them,” he said of Homeland Security personnel. “We saw that they were going to the very hard-hit areas and that they were going with their cars halfway empty. They said we could bring food, so we began giving them food. They began taking thousands of sandwiches.”

FEMA initially provided money to World Central Kitchen to prepare 20,000 meals. But when the agency tried to negotiate a second contract to prepare another 20,000 meals, Andrés balked. The chef wanted money for 120,000 meals, which exceeded FEMA’s authority to grant without putting the contract out to bid, an agency spokesman said. Regardless, FEMA said it was still looking at another contract with WCK to fund the organization’s meals program.

Andrés then expressed his frustration about government bureaucracy to a Time magazine reporter.

“FEMA used me as a puppet to show that they were doing something,” Andrés told the magazine about the original contract.

Several days later, Andrés dialed down his rhetoric, if not his desire to see more from his government. The native Spaniard became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2013.

“You know me, nobody holds me back. But at the same time, you have to be strategic,” Andrés said. He understands that FEMA employees have to abide by the rules and the thresholds established by people higher up in the agency. But he would still like to see more flexibility from the agency, particular during times of crisis.

“Bureaucracy needs to give them the tools to move quick and fast to take care of people,” he said. “If bureaucracy doesn’t allow them to move quick and fast, it’s a problem.”

Andrés is not just talking the talk, either. Since he arrived in Puerto Rico, he has put much of his life on hold in Washington, where he oversees ThinkFoodGroup, a company with more than a dozen restaurants, a catering division and a food truck. Andrés was in Puerto Rico, in fact, when he heard the news that Minibar, the chef’s gastronomic funhouse in Penn Quarter, maintained its two Michelin stars.

In the three-plus weeks since Maria pummeled the island, Andrés has been home only three or four days, he said. He returned once after becoming dehydrated.

“The reality here is very hard to escape. My question is, if we don’t do it, who’s going to do it?” Andrés said about feeding Puerto Ricans. “Fresh food is hard to come by . . . Sometimes the only fresh food people are eating is fruit we are bringing. The only hot meal they are eating is the lukewarm meal we are bringing.”

Andrés hopes that World Central Kitchen is demonstrating what kind of results a nonprofit with a “private sector mentality” can achieve. He suspects that, in years to come, others will be examining “our successes and failures and how we did it.”

“How we were able to go from 100 meals to a million meals,” he added. The secret, Andrés noted, was the chef community, the many volunteers who picked up a knife and got to it. A chef’s disposition, Andrés said, is to know how to adapt to crisis.

“We are survivors,” he said. “We never wanted to be here for so long . . . But circumstances invited us to be part of it.”

Then Andrés remembered a favorite quote from literature, taken from a John Steinbeck novel: “Where there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I will be there,” he said.

Andrés remembered the quote almost verbatim. It’s a line from Tom Joad, the central character in Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel, “The Grapes of Wrath.” Joad is the one who experiences a major transformation over the course of the story. He, as CliffsNotes reminds us, undergoes a “moral journey from self to community, from ‘I’ to ‘we.’”

 

[MarblesMom]

Apologies if this has already been posted.   PR is still in need, and I am so sad that all that fake news out there just ignores it /s.

M'isla.

http://time.com/4988841/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-numbers-recovery/

 

[GrumpyGran]

11 hours ago, MarblesMom said:

Apologies if this has already been posted.   PR is still in need, and I am so sad that all that fake news out there just ignores it /s.

M'isla.

http://time.com/4988841/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-numbers-recovery/

 

Sadly, we do still have tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of citizens of this country trying to recover from devastating events that have taken place over the last three months. Southeast Texas, parts of Florida, particularly the southwest coast, people mourning in Las Vegas, Puerto Rico, several large areas in California. Normally we would all be focusing on helping all of these fellow Americans recover. But this country isn't normal anymore. No, every day we have to deal with an immature, egotistical, whiny blow hard trying to boast of things he hasn't done, deny things he does in public and move us to the brink of annihilation.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"San Juan’s mayor says her life is inside out, but she’s working to right Puerto Rico while taking on Trump"

Spoiler

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO — Tucked deep beneath the bleachers at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum, a hulking concrete sports and concert venue, past half a dozen security checkpoints and down a tiled hallway, there stands a double row of small rectangular dressing rooms.

The hideaways, outfitted with cots, have been home to Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, key staffers and, in some cases, their families, since Hurricane Maria brutally pinwheeled through Puerto Rico on Sept. 20. Cruz, whose blunt and provocative criticism of the federal response to the storm has made her an object of White House scorn — but also earned her many admirers — sarcastically calls the converted sleeping area “The Trump Tower Presidential Suites.”

One evening, Cruz recalls, an observant staffer in the “suites” asked why she was wearing her pajamas inside out.

“Because,” she responded, “my world is inside out.”

More than four weeks into a crisis that seems likely to stretch for months, if not years, the 54-year-old Cruz has positioned herself as the face of the island — tearful, then angry, then frustrated, then hopeful, then resolute — a made-for-live-streaming omnipresence with a mile-wide emotional range. Like Ray Nagin, the New Orleans mayor whose desperate cries for help played an early role in jolting the nation to attention about Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Cruz has demanded that people listen.

But unlike the often-befuddled Nagin, Cruz has gone about the task with a blend of message discipline and media savvy fit for the digital age.

On high-profile treks through San Juan, her ravaged, debris-strewn and power-starved city, she is trailed by a mayor’s office photographer and videographer, who feed images to her social media accounts. Images of her tromping through floodwaters, rescuing the elderly and delivering supplies are everywhere, because she seems to be everywhere.

Cruz is fond of profanity, and she’s become eminently bleepable as well as eminently quotable as she tries to communicate the urgency of the plight here. She brusquely dismisses criticism of her approach, waving off portrayals that cast her as a whiner or grandstander.

“I don’t give a s---,” she said in an interview at a folding table on the basketball court of the Clemente coliseum, now piled with pallets of bottled water and canned goods. “Because people’s lives are at stake.”

Cruz’s smash-mouth approach to the White House administration — she has called President Donald Trump “disrespectful,” “the miscommunicator-in-chief,” and “the hater-in-chief” among other things — raises the question of whether a local official can get what she needs despite a strained relationship with Washington.

“She takes risks,” said José Vargas Vidot, a physician and independent member of the Puerto Rican Senate from San Juan. “That’s a good virtue. She has earned the right to be critical because she has also taken action.”

Trump has threatened to abandon Puerto Rico recovery efforts. He also has sniped that Cruz is demonstrating “poor leadership,” and Trump’s Federal Emergency Management Agency director, William “Brock” Long, recently told ABC that “we filtered out the mayor a long time ago. We don’t have time for the political noise.”

Cruz seems to be banking on her ability to work around Trump, leveraging her mega-media platform and appealing directly to the public and to corporate givers. She points to truckloads of corporate donations pouring in as verification that she’s on the right path. But she also has continued to nudge the federal government to do much more, both in terms of relief resources and in delivering financial assistance to an island that has long been drowning in debt.

“The nation has a big heart and the president has a big mouth,” Cruz said.

Cruz detonated in the national consciousness shortly after Maria struck, delivering impassioned remarks at a news conference. She warned of a potential “genocide” and delivered a line that defined the early coverage of the storm: “We are dying here and you are killing us with the inefficiency and the bureaucracy.”

The words she used in the news conference were such a hit that her staff printed them out on a computer and ironed them onto a black T-shirt, she said. She wore the T-shirt on a national television interview. Later, when Trump disparaged her as “nasty,” she appeared for interviews with a T-shirt that read “nasty.”

She was going to a playbook she’d used before. Cruz confides that she has lots of T-shirts — 179 to be exact — each with a political message.

“LGBT,” she says, launching into a long list.

“Against contamination of our land.”

“In favor of women’s rights.”

As Cruz was talking, the conversation was interrupted by someone bringing over white rice and pork chops.

“Oh my God,” she said.

She tilted her head forward, removed her glasses, and held her face in her hands for several moments. When she lowered her hands, her eyes had welled with tears.

“It’s warm,” she said, adding that she hadn’t had warm food in a long while.

Cruz, like many islanders, made her way to the mainland United States. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a master’s from Carnegie Mellon, then went on to human resources executive positions, according to her official biography.

She gave birth to her only child, Marina Paul Yulín Cruz, in Pennsylvania, but in the 1990s she was drawn back to the island to work as an adviser to Sila María Calderón, who would later become governor.

Cruz went on to serve as an elected member of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, then launched a campaign for mayor in 2012. Few gave her a chance.

“I wanted to be mayor but my party didn’t want me,” she said. “I was perhaps too liberal.”

Vargas Vidot, the Puerto Rican senator, said Cruz’s independent streak has been one of her greatest virtues, but also one of her weaknesses.

“She has a lot of forces working against her, including her own party,” Vargas Vidot said. “It’s necessary to create alliances. It’s necessary to make connections.”

During the interview with Cruz, she occasionally fingered a rosary that dangled from her left wrist. When asked about it, she recalled without hesitation the exact day she received it: Feb. 19, 2012.

At that time, she said, her campaign seemed to be going nowhere. But on that day that she remembers with such precision, she ran into a woman she didn’t know at a restaurant. The woman told her: “You’re going to be mayor in November.”

She says her response was something like, “Yeah, right.”

Shortly thereafter, a rival became embroiled in scandal, and she ended up winning an unlikely victory. She’s worn the rosary ever since.

Not surprisingly, the attention she’s received since the hurricane has led to speculation that she has set her sights on higher office, such as the governorship. Cruz has now taken to countering the rumors by telling several local media organizations that she will not seek the governor’s office and that if she runs for anything in 2020, it will be for reelection as mayor.

At times she effects the demeanor of a drill sergeant, loudly barking orders. She can be self-effacing one moment — laughing as a random cat strolls through her news conference or pulling off her cap to show reporters the gray roots in her dyed blonde hair — and imperious the next, yelling profanities into the phone or gruffly ordering around her staffers, who scurry at the barest hint of a request.

“She’s always been this way, even when she was little,” said Cruz’s aunt, Irma Soto, as she watched her niece. “Always the leader.”

On a recent afternoon, as Cruz’s team of staffers and volunteers was packing to leave on a tour of San Juan, Cruz began straightening up chairs in the corner of the coliseum basketball court where she holds news conferences.

“When I was in school, I was too short to erase the blackboard,” the diminutive mayor said. “It was my job to put away the chairs.”

Later that afternoon, Cruz’s caravan — pickup trucks, a press van, police motorcycles — pushed off from the coliseum, sirens blaring to clear holes in the epic San Juan traffic.

They came to a stop on a scruffy street on a bluff overlooking the city.

Cruz bounded out of one of the lead vehicles. She wore cargo pants tucked into the brown “5.11 Tactical” brand combat boots that have become her signature look during the crisis. She wears gray horn-rimmed glasses that look like expensive designer frames.

“They’re cheaters,” she said later with a laugh, pulling them off and pointing out how the tint is peeling away. “$19.99 at Walgreen’s.”

Trailed by cameras and a small pack of reporters, she made her way down a street lined with modest concrete homes, looking for old people.

At the high end of the steep street she plunged into a house where someone had told her some senior citizens lived. She popped out moments later.

“Donde estan los viejitos?” she yelled. Where are the little old people?

Startled neighbors, who had come out onto their porches and stoops, pointed to a small yellow house. Cruz went inside. There she found several older people, and she started quizzing them about their medicines. For all the journalists spreading across San Juan, Cruz — through her social media postings and nonstop interviews — has become, in a sense, one of the foremost chroniclers of the storm’s aftermath. In this little house, she’d found another story to tell, one she says would have been missed if her caravan had been moving too fast.

“Then you will lose the human stories behind it and the human condition behind it,” Cruz said.

From there, her caravan made its way deep into Caimito, an impoverished stretch of outer San Juan that was once a rural getaway but now has been swallowed by the spreading city, filling with the flimsy homes of some of the area’s poorest residents. Her destination was the home of a 9-year-old boy genius with a 140 IQ who lost almost all his books during the storm.

Above her head, a drone — operated by a charitable organization that is distributing solar lamps — videotaped everything.

At the base of a precipitous gravelly roadway, the procession stopped. Cruz went ahead alone as staffers held back the reporters.

“This boy is a genius,” one of Cruz’s top aides, José Cruz, whispered in a voice reminiscent of a golf announcer narrating a crucial putt.

A child in a blue T-shirt, shorts and Crocs emerged from a cinder block house that lost its roof to the storm and had walls patched with plywood. It clung perilously to the edge of the hillside above a steep ravine.

“This is him,” the mayoral aide, whispered. “Look at him with his books.”

Ever the master of ceremonies, Cruz suggested that the boy lead the camera crews on a tour of his wrecked house. Cruz hung back. With the cameras turned away from her, she and the boy’s mother embraced for a long time. Both of them were crying.

“God,” the mother said, “will reward you for this.”

One of the best lines I've seen this week: “The nation has a big heart and the president has a big mouth,” Cruz said.

[fraurosena]

This is beyond apalling. 

 

[candygirl200413]

This honestly broke me so much. It upset me so much just reading the first few paragraphs ( I have yet to finish it right now) but:

Puerto Rico Is Burning Its Dead, And We May Never Know How Many People The Hurricane Really Killed

 

Also one of my peers goes to law school down in PR (she is a Puerto Rican). She has classes starting back on Monday and while she herself has been extremely lucky and grateful for having minimized damaged, it's still obviously pretty bad there and I'm in awe as well as her and her peers down there that they're still allowing classes to happen when there's barely any power/food/anything.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Puerto Rico’s utility cancels controversial $300 million contract with Montana firm hired to repair electrical grid"

Spoiler

BREAKING: The announcement by the island state-owned utility came hours after Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello called for the contract with Whitefish Energy to be canceled.

The governor of Puerto Rico called for the cancellation of a controversial $300 million contract the island’s utility signed with a small Montana-based company tasked with a central role in repairing the territory’s hurricane-ravaged electric power grid.

Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said that the contract was a distraction after critics in the electric power industry, Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency raised questions about whether the company, Whitefish Energy, was well equipped to respond to the hurricane damage.

Thirty-nine days after Hurricane Maria hit the territory, Rossello said that he would request assistance from Florida and New York under mutual aid arrangements that utilities traditionally activate to help other states during an emergency. About 80 percent of the people living on the island still have no electricity.

“As a result of the information that has been revealed and the need to protect the public interest, as governor I am asking the power authority to cancel the Whitefish contract immediately,” Rosselló said in an unusual Sunday morning news conference at La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion.

In tweets Sunday morning, Rosselló also called for additional measures to scrutinize contracting by the island’s power authority more carefully. Rossello said there should be a “special outside coordinator” to monitor the utility’s purchases so we “can have more clarity in this process.”

The governor’s statements, however, added to the confusion about the oversight of the utility and the commonwealth, both of which are bankrupt. A financial oversight board Congress created for Puerto Rico is planning to ask a federal court this week for clear authority to examine contracts as small as $10 million. The federal judge is overseeing the restructuring of Puerto Rico’s more than $70 billion in debts.

Just last week, the oversight board also said it would use its authority to install its own emergency manager to pay closer attention to the day-to-day operations of the utility. The governor is opposing the appointment and said he would name his own administrator for PREPA’s purchases.

The governor also did not say how the utility would disentangle itself from the contract with Whitefish Energy.

Whitefish Energy, which had just two employees the day Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, now has about 325 people working on restringing transmission lines, clearing debris and erecting fallen poles. It has been working under contract with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.

Whitefish, Mont., is the home of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, although the company said he played no role in securing the business. One of Zinke’s sons worked for Whitefish Energy over the summer.

Many people in the utility business had said that the authority, known as PREPA, would have been better off tapping into the well-established networks of utilities that have formed mutual aid groups expressly for the purpose of emergency relief. In addition, many in the industry have suggested that Whitefish Energy’s pay scales — as high as $462 an hour — were much higher than is typical even in an emergency such as the one facing Puerto Rico.

The Whitefish Energy contract also had a clause that said that the pay rates and other terms of the agreement could not be audited or reviewed by FEMA or the General Accounting Office. The contract also said that FEMA had reviewed and approved the agreement and that the agency would reimburse PREPA or Whitefish Energy for emergency expenditures. FEMA on Friday said that it had not approved the Whitefish Energy agreement.

Hopefully utility companies in Florida and NY can get workers there promptly.

[onekidanddone]

5 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Puerto Rico’s utility cancels controversial $300 million contract with Montana firm hired to repair electrical grid"

Hopefully utility companies in Florida and NY can get workers there promptly.

The whole deal stinks to high heaven and screams Halliburton. Is there anything that isn't corrupt with this administration?  Whitefish MT is also the home to Richard Spencer one of the leaders of the alt-right hate groups.

I've been through there on the train and it is very beautiful, but when I was on my last train trip in April, I got the chills thinking about Spencer.

[Destiny]

Also one of my peers goes to law school down in PR (she is a Puerto Rican). She has classes starting back on Monday and while she herself has been extremely lucky and grateful for having minimized damaged, it's still obviously pretty bad there and I'm in awe as well as her and her peers down there that they're still allowing classes to happen when there's barely any power/food/anything.

BFF had a test on Tuesday. He took it via flashlight. UPR medical sciences campus didn’t have power off and on all last week.

[GrumpyGran]

15 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

The whole deal stinks to high heaven and screams Halliburton. Is there anything that isn't corrupt with this administration?  Whitefish MT is also the home to Richard Spencer one of the leaders of the alt-right hate groups.

I've been through there on the train and it is very beautiful, but when I was on my last train trip in April, I got the chills thinking about Spencer.

Maybe we need to re-name it Whitemen, MT.

[fraurosena]

Oopsie...

I sincerely hope all 130,000 of them register and vote next year! 

[GreyhoundFan]

I wonder if the TT will even acknowledge this: "Puerto Rico Unity March draws demonstrators in rally for disaster aid"

Spoiler

Demonstrators packed the Mall on Sunday for a Unity March in support of disaster relief for hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rican flags flapped in the wind as speakers made impassioned pleas for funding and support for Puerto Rico, which is still recovering from the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The hurricane made landfall in September and devastated the U.S. territory of 3.4 million people.

By afternoon, hundreds had amassed in front of the Lincoln Memorial as part of the Unity March for Puerto Rico. Many more had showed up in the morning to march from the U.S. Capitol, down Independence Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial, as marchers observed attendance in the thousands.

Evelyn Mejil, Sunday’s event organizer, said the demonstration was a powerful display of unity behind the efforts to rebuild Puerto Rico. She said the event came together amid a tense personal struggle; she didn’t hear from her family for two weeks.

“It was a combination of frustration, anger, sadness, desperation, anxiety,” Mejil said.

Mejil, 40, who lives in northern New Jersey, learned that her relatives lost their homes.

“When you get that feeling of powerless and voiceless, I thought that something needed to be done.”

She characterized the rally as a success.

“I think everyone was able to unify and be one message, which is, ‘We’re here for Puerto Rico and we’re going to continue to make sure we put pressure on Congress so that we do the right thing for Puerto Rico.’”

Among the marchers was “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who demonstrated along with the nonprofit Hispanic Federation.

Two months after the hurricane, more than half of the island is still without power, according to a Puerto Rican government website tracking disaster relief. About 10 percent of the island’s residents still lack access to running water.

“And so today we march. Peacefully and with purpose,” Miranda, the Tony-Award-winning playwright tweeted.

Rafael Martinez, 55, arrived from New York City early Sunday morning with his wife, Jay Ortiz, and their two young daughters to help demand government support for the island.

“This is [President] Trump’s Katrina,” Martinez said. “Enough is enough. People are starving, they don’t have clean water, and some don’t even have roofs. We need to help these people.”

His wife nodded in agreement as their children huddled nearby.

“Just because we’re separate, we’re not getting the support we deserve,” said Ortiz, 35.

On its website, the Hispanic Federation listed a number of pleas: proportionate aid for Puerto Rico to that given for disaster relief to the mainland United States, where Hurricanes Harvey and Irma battered cities in Texas and Florida; stronger infrastructure in Puerto Rico that can outlast future hurricanes; swift delivery of supplies to residents in need; elimination of the Jones Act, which limits how many ships can be sent to Puerto Rico; and forgiveness of Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt.

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, commonly referred to as the Jones Act, was a popular target of the speakers and rally attendees.

Marchers demonstrated against the World War I-era law, which mandates U.S. shipments to the island be made on American vessels — even if they’re not the cheapest or most readily available. The Trump administration temporarily waived the Jones Act to speed up hurricane relief in September, but marchers on Sunday pushed for its permanent repeal.

For 49-year-old Debbie Rios of Baltimore, Sunday’s march served two main purposes: to show support for Puerto Rico and to educate people about the Jones Act.

“It’s a long road,” she said. “We really need everyone to understand how the Jones Act is hurting the island.”

Puerto Rico has asked Congress for $94 billion in disaster relief aid, according to the Associated Press, including $18 billion to rebuild the island’s power grid and $31 billion for housing. The White House asked Congress last week for $44 billion in disaster aid for hurricane-ravaged areas in Texas, Puerto Rico and Florida. The amount was decried by lawmakers as too small, according to AP.

There are lots of pictures and tweets in the article.

[candygirl200413]

It's just so sad because this should be expected, they should get the aid they need and it hurts that they just need to do a march to get help.

[Destiny]

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005620786/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-mental-health.html?smid=tw-share

This is probably one of the most depressing things I've seen in a while. It follows the workers at the only suicide hotline in PR. 

[fraurosena]

I know I'm digging up an old thread from last year, but Hurricane Season has arrived again, and this news broke today. I'm afraid it's being overshadowed by that hideous Roseanne tweet and consequent cancellation of her show, but this is just so horrific and it deserves all the attention it can get. No matter how awful someones racist views may be, it is inconsequential to the (preventable!) deaths of thousands of people.

 

[fraurosena]

I'm afraid my prediction became true. Sadly, nobody is talking about this. To be honest, I don't get why not. More American lives lost than 9/11, but I guess brown lives don't count, even for the MSM. What a sad and sorry state America has fallen into, that one racist celebrity's loss of her tv-show is deemed more important news than this tragedy.

 

[Destiny]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I'm afraid my prediction became true. Sadly, nobody is talking about this. To be honest, I don't get why not. More American lives lost than 9/11, but I guess brown lives don't count, even for the MSM. What a sad and sorry state America has fallen into, that one racist celebrity's loss of her tv-show is deemed more important news than this tragedy.

 

They are talking about it in PR, and at least David Bengnaud (who is a Puerto Rican hero now) is headed over there to ask questions. I love Bengnaud. He refuses to let people forget the people of PR. Every day, without fail, he reminds the American people that there are still Americans with no electricity, nearly 8 months later.

I know the networks are covering it, but not nearly enough for the scandal that it should be.

[Destiny]

Relevant:

https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/life/empowerment/2017/10/18/david-begnaud-story-has-changed-me/759348001/ << The site is shitty, but it's a good synopsis for why he's beloved.

https://variety.com/2017/tv/news/david-begnaud-cbs-news-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-harvey-1202612330/ 

His twitter:

https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud

He's back there now asking questions, though, he's been saying for MONTHS that the death toll was higher (as have I and many other people with loved ones there).

[formergothardite]

One of the problems is that many Americans don't view or know that the people of PR are American citizens. They view that as another country. 

I don't know why the news won't make a bigger deal. Why were the numbers lied about? 

[Destiny]

1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

I don't know why the news won't make a bigger deal. Why were the numbers lied about? 

Assholes don't want to pay for those Mexicans. (Please note the sarcasm font. I am aware that they are Americans, not Mexican.)

Honestly though, I really think the above has a lot to do with it. 

[fraurosena]

As obnoxious as I find the governmental response, it doesn’t really surprise me. What I think is shameful and inexplicable is the MSM lack of coverage.

 

[MarblesMom]

I know my memory often fails me, but I seem to recall when The Toddler was going to head to PR, he instead went to Vegas where (white) people died.... I do remember something about him sadly, throwing rolls of paper towels at Puerto Ricans (later), and his comment that PR is an island, in a big, big ocean or something of that nature, in his pea-sized (yuge, bestest) brain.

PR was once a very strategic land mass during the Cuba crisis... The US, in recent decades, shut down most the US military presence there, which carried a ton of the local economy.... I am afraid that now that the island is in bankruptcy/massive debt/losing population mode, and that situation just doesn't rank up there with Toddler priorities.    

Take PR on as a state? Nonsense! They are an albatross.  Live on the island?  Cannot vote for President.  Catch a flight to the States, and you count!  

I personally know people who are still without electricity.  Their patience is waning.

Sorry, I vented/ranted.  

[candygirl200413]

So I've been kept in the know with a former peer who is currently at law school in PR and it's just be so heartbreaking. It makes me sad and it makes me sadder that hurricane season is coming soon and orange fuckface and this administration won't do shit again and thy have still barely recovered. 

[TuringMachine]

I'm still not convinced that Trump is aware that Puerto Rico is part of the US.

[formergothardite]

I've been posting about this on my facebook page and I've already had one person respond that Puerto Ricans aren't American and that their own government needs to help them. Luckily people chimed in to explain that the American government is their government and yes, they are American. There needs to be some sort of campaign that lets people know that PR is really part of America. But that isn't going to happen with our current president. He doesn't want brown people being part of America.