Puerto Rico And Virgin Islands Still Not Getting Enough Help

(This photo of the Public Works Department workshop in Puerto Rico just last month is by Christopher Gregory.)

After being hit by two hurricanes, much of the infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands was devastated. The residents, all American citizens, had hoped they would get enough help from the U.S. government to rebuild.

That help was slow in coming, and now has virtually stopped -- far short of what is needed. It seems that the Trump administration simply doesn't care about them. The federal government was quick to help Texas and Florida after they were hit, but the same cannot be said for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Here is just part of an excellent article on this travesty written for the New York Times by Mark Walker and Zolan Kanno-Youngs.

ST. CROIX, U.S. Virgin Islands — More than two years after back-to-back hurricanes ravaged this tropical island, medical workers are still treating gunshot wounds in hallways and kidney failure in a trailer. They ignore their own inflamed rashes that they say are caused by the mold that has shut down an entire hospital floor below a still-porous roof.

At least they have a hospital. The lone medical center on Vieques, an idyllic island that is part of Puerto Rico, was severely damaged by Hurricanes Maria and Irma, then abandoned to wandering roosters and grazing horses. Ailing people wait at the ferry dock to catch a boat to the mainland. 

Two years on, “we are in the same situation as we were in the days after the hurricane,” said Rafael Surillo Ruiz, the mayor of Yabucoa, on Puerto Rico’s hard-hit eastern edge.

An examination of Federal Emergency Management Agency dataand records demonstrates the degree to which the recovery from Hurricanes Maria and Irma on America’s Caribbean islands has been stalled compared with some of the most disaster-prone states on the mainland, leaving the islands’ critical infrastructure in squalor and limbo. FEMA officials say 190 long-term recovery projects have been funded in Puerto Rico — out of more than 9,000 requests. On the United States Virgin Islands, about 218 projects had funding — out of more than 1,500 requests and still counting.

In contrast, about 3,700 large and small permanent work projects had obligated funding in Texas, two years after Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast in August 2017. More than 3,700 such projects had been funded over that time in Florida.

That disparity underscored how a federal government in Washington has treated citizens on the mainland, with voting representatives in Congress and a say in presidential contests, compared with citizens on the islands. . . .

“At the end of the day, we’re talking about the life and the well-being of human beings,” said Dyma Williams, the acting chief executive at the Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital on St. Croix. “I hate to make the distinction about American versus not American, but at the end of the day, we’re not being treated the same way as other Americans are being treated.”. . .

FEMA, through its public assistance program, helps communities recover from major disasters by assisting with debris removal, lifesaving emergency protective measures and public infrastructure reconstruction. Debris removal and protective measures are classified as emergency work. The “permanent work” of public infrastructure repair is what guarantees long-term recovery.

And that permanent work is in little evidence on St. Croix and in Puerto Rico.