The Puerto Rico Thread

Meadmaker said:
Exactly. They're patting themselves on the back for rapidly moving large quantities of bottled water and such. The problem is that this is not a textbook situation. Thursday morning, i.e. last Thursday morning, the day after the hurricane, they should have appointed a general to take charge, and started getting heavy equipment into place to get at least a small portion of the grid up and running.
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Right, and that General should be focused on getting the major systems connected, not bottled water.

After the hospitals had fuel, Trump could have called up the Wal-mart CEO and said "The US Gov't would like your help. We'll send plenty of fuel and a comm line to any store you need opened and we'll clear the way if your team can truck in all the basic supplies you can manage. We might also need a portion of your warehouse and a FEMA distribution in your parking lot. Deal?"
Instead, FEMA has their own centers at select City Halls. (City Halls don't have supplies waiting at the port and multiple loading bays for large trucks. But that's government for you. Too large to change strategy without 15 committee meetings!)

Then call Home Depot, Walgreens, and other big distributors. Use the people and infrastructure already in place. They know how to do it. They can be paid and it is great PR. FEMA and military then have more manpower to work on the grid or go to more remote areas.

There are wasted opportunities. This looks all too governmental.
A businessman should do better at this one. Maybe he tried it and failed for some reason. :confused:
 
Sherkeu said:
Right, and that General should be focused on getting the major systems connected, not bottled water.

After the hospitals had fuel, Trump could have called up the Wal-mart CEO and said "The US Gov't would like your help. We'll send plenty of fuel and a comm line to any store you need opened and we'll clear the way if your team can truck in all the basic supplies you can manage. We might also need a portion of your warehouse and a FEMA distribution in your parking lot. Deal?"
Instead, FEMA has their own centers at select City Halls. (City Halls don't have supplies waiting at the port and multiple loading bays for large trucks. But that's government for you. Too large to change strategy without 15 committee meetings!)

Then call Home Depot, Walgreens, and other big distributors. Use the people and infrastructure already in place. They know how to do it. They can be paid and it is great PR. FEMA and military then have more manpower to work on the grid or go to more remote areas.

There are wasted opportunities. This looks all too governmental.
A businessman should do better at this one. Maybe he tried it and failed for some reason. :confused:
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Without cell towers credit cards are not working. They need the cell towers first.

Otherwise, a public-private partnership sounds innovative.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Without cell towers credit cards are not working. They need the cell towers first.

Otherwise, a public-private partnership sounds innovative.
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I referred to it as a "comm line" because I really don't know what the military or FEMA does for regular communications in disasters but it must be independent. Maybe satellite? or send it to a receiver on a ship? Cell towers have their own supply chain links that all need power.

Speaking of power, I wonder how long the cellular network (or anything really) could have run if they had Tesla's powerpacks? (for the towers that survived and assuming no working solar panels)
 
Today's DOE report still had 5% as the number of customers who had power, but then noted that more had had power restored, but a new estimate was not yet available.
 
The PDJT just dedicated this weekend's golf tournament trophy to the People of Puerto Rico.

Almost as good as sending prayers.
 
Meadmaker said:
Today's DOE report still had 5% as the number of customers who had power, but then noted that more had had power restored, but a new estimate was not yet available.
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Night time satellite photos show 20% lit up. That was a few days ago.
 
casebro said:
Night time satellite photos show 20% lit up. That was a few days ago.
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Better tell the Department of Energy, they still think that as of Thursday, the number of customers lit up was 0%. Now it is more than 5%, but they don't know how many more.


Of course the discrepancy is that the satellite photos would show generator lights, while the DoE figures are based on people receiving power from the grid. The huge number of generators running is the reason everyone is desperate to find fuel.


As best I can tell, the very worst of the crisis is over. Power is coming back. Most places will have running, and probably potable, water within a few days, I would think. It's so hard to tell because, to say it again, the news media is more interested in the human side of the tragedy than the engineering side of things. I would be interested in knowing if one of those pharmaceutical companies has a projected back-to-work day. If there is a working ATM in the capital. What percentage of people have 1) running water for sanitation, 2) drinkable running water? 3) Drinkable after boiling, along with the ability to boil? For those who do not, are they in isolated mountain towns, or in the suburbs of San Juan? How many people did something today for which they will receive a paycheck?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta trying to track down medicine for one clinic makes better TV than some statistics about unfilled prescriptions.

Puerto Rico won't be
 
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alfaniner said:
Just when I think The PDJT can't get any more assholy, he gets assholier. (re: his first tweets about Puerto Rico that they owe a lot of money).
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This mirrors exactly my thoughts. Exactly.

I hope though that the narrative won't be the main story. I want to know much more about the relief effort underway. If disaster management can be shown to be competent/incompetent through a detailed timeline comparing the PR effort vs. Florida and Texas.

It's possible that PR is in such complicated mess that FEMA or whoever really is doing the best it can. Maybe it's just that hard to get things running again.
 
Darth Rotor said:
So why aren't they a state? (It's been a few years since I was following the internal PR politics, but if that much positive response to this very old issue is what's coming along now, what's the obstacle to becoming number 51? FFS, they are closer to CONUS than Alaska or Hawaii.)
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Congress has no desire to add in two democratic senators. They can't make themselves a state congress needs to do it.
 
Minoosh said:
It's possible that PR is in such complicated mess that FEMA or whoever really is doing the best it can. Maybe it's just that hard to get things running again.
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It is much more complicated than Florida or Texas. It really can't be approached the same way and be successful.

What does FEMA normally do? They pretty much care for homeless people, and write checks. In a normal hurricane, there is an area where some fraction of the people have been left homeless. Within days, though, a fair number of those people have taken up with family, or friends, or they have enough money to drive to someplace where there isn't a sold out hotel. FEMA normally just has to take care of a few thousand people in temporary shelters, and those few thousand people are surrounded by millions of people who have been affected, but not wiped out

After that, what FEMA mostly does is damage assessment and paying claims. They write checks, and they do everything that they do from an area a few miles outside the disaster zone, where they are working in normally functioning hotels and restaurants.

FEMA doesn't normally reconnect utility services. Utility companies do that. The utility companies call in thousands of people from a multistate area, and they get to work. I'm guessing that FEMA might provide some funding for that extra effort, but I don't really know. None of that can happen in Puerto Rico. FEMA just isn't equipped to deal with a situation where millions of people do not have basic services, and the local utility companies were barely able to keep functioning in normal times.

This was not a normal situation, and it did not need a normal response, but bigger.
 
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Meadmaker said:
Much truth in this article:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...was-slow-tuning-into-puerto-ricos-plight.html

Although, my own spin would still hit the president harder. The president has the power to turn any issue into front page news. He didn't.
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He didn't know about it until it was on fox and friends though. If they made a point of it earlier the president would have known. When you are the presidents main source of information you have a higher duty than just some morning news program, and Fox needs to learn that.
 
Meadmaker said:
Much truth in this article:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...was-slow-tuning-into-puerto-ricos-plight.html

(Summary: The media wasn't as interested in Puerto Rico due to disaster fatigue, and less interest in a Carribean island than a real state.)

Although, my own spin would still hit the president harder. The president has the power to turn any issue into front page news. He didn't.
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The result could spell disaster for Trump in a not too unlikely scenario where a million or so Puerto Ricans move to the mainland US as a result of the disasterous state of their island, a combination of bankruptcy and the hurricane.

If half of them move to Texas and half to Florida and they may well be both blue come 2020.

McHrozni
 
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