The Puerto Rico Thread

ponderingturtle said:
My understanding is that the 50% has nothing to do with customers, it is generating capacity that is back on line.
Click to expand...

The Don said:
That's my understanding too....
Click to expand...


You're right. Which means that we really don't know what that tells us about households and businesses with power restored.

At the end of last month they had put that at 30%. This was before these most recent outages.

I can't seem to find any more recent figures for that view of the progress of power restoration.
 
ponderingturtle said:
My understanding is that the 50% has nothing to do with customers, it is generating capacity that is back on line.
Click to expand...

From a Slate article yesterday,

The Status.pr page states that power generation was up to 46.6 percent of capacity as of Monday. But generation is one thing; distribution is another.
Click to expand...

So yes.

Trebuchet said:
Nothing in the US media, either. They have the attention span of a gnat.
Click to expand...

NBC News has either continuously or near continuously kept one or more articles directly linked to on their homepage. ABC has one at the moment about Whitefish on their homepage, but hasn't had as much coverage, to my recollection. CNN has nothing at the moment on their homepage, but... what they link to and focus on seems to be a bit like a hyperactive child, lately.:rolleyes:
 
Thermal said:
Yeah, more people seem interested in the whiff of political scandal than in U.S. citizens in month three without power and water.
Click to expand...
Yes that, but I was under the impression that Whitefish was not working on the power grid in PR anymore since the contract was cancelled. Was surprised to hear that they are still working in PR on the power grid.

We can only hope that better preparations are put in place to deal with a catastrophic hurricane once PR recovers from this.

Perhaps put the power grid underground, or at least put critical parts of it underground, and have more backup gens on critical infrastructure. Maybe have underground emergency fuel and water storage.

FEMA should have some supplies and equipment in place for PR when hurricane season starts, since PR has a 1,000 mile handicap of distance over water.

We have all the power lines above ground where I live, and the power is knocked out so easily. We always wonder why they don't put it underground. It would be difficult to change our grid, of course, but PR has a chance to make some big changes since the grid was largely destroyed anyway and needs to be rebuilt.
 
LTC8K6 said:
Yes that, but I was under the impression that Whitefish was not working on the power grid in PR anymore since the contract was cancelled. Was surprised to hear that they are still working in PR on the power grid.
Click to expand...

As I am reading it, Whitefish was to complete the elements they were working on to create a logical and safe starting point for the replacement contractor/s to resume.

We can only hope that better preparations are put in place to deal with a catastrophic hurricane once PR recovers from this.

Perhaps put the power grid underground, or at least put critical parts of it underground, and have more backup gens on critical infrastructure. Maybe have underground emergency fuel and water storage.

FEMA should have some supplies and equipment in place for PR when hurricane season starts, since PR has a 1,000 mile handicap of distance over water.

We have all the power lines above ground where I live, and the power is knocked out so easily. We always wonder why they don't put it underground. It would be difficult to change our grid, of course, but PR has a chance to make some big changes since the grid was largely destroyed anyway and needs to be rebuilt.
Click to expand...

Much higher initial costs, risks of unseen damages and higher difficulty in troubleshooting problems/repairs. PR is already pretty broke; a higher-end upgrade may not be in their budget.
 
Puerto Rico is still a mess..

http://status.pr/

Presumably they'd be getting way more attention if they weren't so brown. Still cannot understand why the Trump Administration isn't being hauled over the coals for this by the Democratic Party - unless there are just too many things to get annoyed about and this is just one of them.

Maybe that's the new template for the future. If you screw up a couple of things, you provide a something for your opponents to attack you with, screw up everything and you're fine.....
 
It's almost as if an unprecedented disaster occurred where every single electrical wire was ripped out of every single home, business, and building. Why haven't thousands of power company trucks descended on the island and run and hooked up thousands of miles of power cables? Why wasn't this tiny feat accomplished within hours after the last raindrop fell?
 
Wolrab said:
It's almost as if an unprecedented disaster occurred where every single electrical wire was ripped out of every single home, business, and building. Why haven't thousands of power company trucks descended on the island and run and hooked up thousands of miles of power cables? Why wasn't this tiny feat accomplished within hours after the last raindrop fell?
Click to expand...


Affluent, populous suburbs and business districts on the very edge of the city limits of San Juan remain without power more than two months after the hurricane passed. The rest of the island is faring about as well as one might expect using that as a baseline.

How does that reality compare with your flippant, exaggerated characterization?

ETA: CNN offered this yesterday.

Puerto Rico's leaders don't know who has power. We tried to find out.

San Juan, Puerto Rico (CNN)Towns and communities across Puerto Rico are entirely without power, more than six weeks after Hurricane Maria.

The island's leadership is touting restoration figures that show nearly 40% of electricity generation has resumed -- but it doesn't say how much of that power is actually reaching homes, schools and hospitals.
Officials from the government and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) don't even know how many people have power for lights, air conditioners, refrigerators and other basic necessities.So, while some power plants can generate power, the ability to transmit it to homes may not be possible in some areas.

One of the union leaders for PREPA employees, Evans Castro Aponte, was hearing things were so bad he estimated just 5% of customers have electricity. That would leave 95% of the 3.4 million Americans on the island without any power unless they can run costly and loud generators that have become difficult to find on the island.
With no reliable government information, CNN tried to contact each of the 78 municipalities in Puerto Rico, which are coordinating their own recoveries.
Most calls simply did not go through. Along with so much here, communication is intermittent at best.
Some 42 of the municipalities could not be contacted.
Of the 36 towns we did reach, 10 said they had 0% power restoration. Others estimated 1, 2, 10, perhaps 20% of homes, businesses and amenities had electricity. Just four regions reported that they were more than half back on line -- Ponce and Guayanilla with 60% of residents with power; San Germán, where 75% of buildings have electricity; and Culebra -- an island off Puerto Rico that's home to just fewer than 2,000 people, where the mayor said 90% had power.
Humacao, an area where almost 54,000 live, has no power. Las Piedras, home to nearly 40,000, has no power. The same story for Loiza, where 30,000 live. And the list goes on and on, six weeks after the blackout.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Wolrab said:
It's almost as if an unprecedented disaster occurred where every single electrical wire was ripped out of every single home, business, and building. Why haven't thousands of power company trucks descended on the island and run and hooked up thousands of miles of power cables? Why wasn't this tiny feat accomplished within hours after the last raindrop fell?
Click to expand...

Hell we can't even get them tarps after months.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/28/puerto-rico-urgently-needed-tarps-delayed-by-failed-30m-fema-contract

At least we can raise business costs there and make the situation worse and fully destroy any hope they have of any kind of recovery. By adding a 20% tax on goods manufactured there.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/11/27/566771228/puerto-ricos-medical-manufacturers-worry-federal-tax-plan-could-kill-storm-recov
 
Bump !

Still a mess:

http://status.pr/

President Trump and his administration have a strange definition of A+ but of course it's being completely ignored by the media. If I was in Puerto Rico I'd also be wondering why I haven't heard a single peep out of a prominent Democratic Party politician for weeks. :mad:
 
Some more reporting on the hot mess that is Puerto Rico's power situation. They did bring in a heavyweight contractor after ditching Whitefish, but the new guys cost a whole lot more (like an extra $200 million) and the job is still largely undone. The feds and the local authorities are still getting a lot less negative press coverage than I think they would if this was happening on the mainland.
 
Next Wednesday, March 28, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee has a show about Puerto Rico.

Other, fairly recent, comedy news shows about the theme:

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Apr. 24, 2016. Yes, before the hurricane! About Puerto Rico's debt crisis!)

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Oct. 2, 2017):

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (Sep. 28, 2017):

The Opposition with Jordan Klepper (Oct. 2, 2017):

The Opposition with Jordan Klepper (Nov. 13, 2017):
 
More blatant racism as the Trump Administration tries to justify neglecting Puerto Rico.

Then consider the 1980 clarification: “[G]reater benefits could disrupt the Puerto Rican economy.” The Supreme Court of the United States accepted a racist generalization about the propensity of Puerto Ricans to work and provide for their families as a rational basis for denying them the same federal benefits as stateside Americans.

The Trump administration—specifically, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar—is now attempting to use that same reasoning to defend against a new version of this challenge to a status quo that never should have been established. Filed April 13, the complaint—brought by Sixta Glays Peña Martínez—challenges Puerto Rico’s exclusion from SSI and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits as well as Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidies under the Equal Protection Clause.
Click to expand...
 
FEMA admits the obvious in new report—it completely failed in its response to Hurricane Maria

On the "upside" -

On Thursday, FEMA released its official after-action report about the agency’s response to Hurricane Maria. Surprisingly, they publicly admitted to what Puerto Ricans know all too well—that the agency failed to properly respond to the humanitarian crisis caused by the Category 4 hurricane on the island almost ten months ago.
Click to expand...

On the downside...

It’s great that FEMA is owning up to its mistakes. But the transparency is too little, too late and doesn’t actually do anything to help Puerto Rico continue to rebuild. The agency is still trying to throw displaced hurricane victims out of the hotels they are temporarily housed in. And the island is right in the middle of hurricane season, with possible hurricanes on the way—which no one is ready or prepared for. Moreover, Donald Trump has not once admitted that he lied about the response in Puerto Rico, previously playing down the extent of the damage, praising FEMA for its response and saying that the disaster was not “a real catastrophe like Katrina.” And, of course, Puerto Ricans and the rest of us won’t forget that he blamed Puerto Ricans for being lazy, wanting a handout and for “throwing the budget out of whack.”
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom