The Puerto Rico Thread

ponderingturtle said:
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.
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What would it matter????? Fox is lies and more lies, not real news.
 
fuelair said:
What would it matter????? Fox is lies and more lies, not real news.
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They are the main source of information for the president though. How was he supposed to know that anything was happening if the media didn't talk about it?
 
Minoosh said:
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.
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It already doesn't seem to be stacking up well vs. Haiti.
 
And today they got a better situation report with some numbers. 5.4% of customers are back with power.

The utility company says they should be up to 15%.....in two weeks.

3.4 million people can't live on an island with no electricity. I'm pretty confident that it is possible to do better than what they are doing. It just seems to me that the lack of central power generation is complicating everything else. Electricity makes it possible to do a lot of other things. Generators are all well and good, but sending fuel to so many point locations is complicating everything.

I don't know. Maybe I just don't understand, but it seems to me that the US military, in cooperation with local authorities, ought to be able to move enough trees, and wire, and equipment, and even build bridges if need be, in a few days, enough to get 340,000 people living close together in San Juan out of the darkness. That would be 10% of the population who were leading something vaguely like normal lives. Find one of the major employers and get them back up and running, so that money could flow into the island.

Or, I suppose you could distribute bottled water for the next three months.
 
Meadmaker said:
And today they got a better situation report with some numbers. 5.4% of customers are back with power.

The utility company says they should be up to 15%.....in two weeks.

3.4 million people can't live on an island with no electricity. I'm pretty confident that it is possible to do better than what they are doing. It just seems to me that the lack of central power generation is complicating everything else. Electricity makes it possible to do a lot of other things. Generators are all well and good, but sending fuel to so many point locations is complicating everything.

I don't know. Maybe I just don't understand, but it seems to me that the US military, in cooperation with local authorities, ought to be able to move enough trees, and wire, and equipment, and even build bridges if need be, in a few days, enough to get 340,000 people living close together in San Juan out of the darkness. That would be 10% of the population who were leading something vaguely like normal lives. Find one of the major employers and get them back up and running, so that money could flow into the island.

Or, I suppose you could distribute bottled water for the next three months.
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Mrs. qg's physical therapist, who comes in twice a week, has a son with family that lives about three miles from San Juan.

Her latest report from him is that they have running water (don't know if potable) but no electricity. He can call her by getting within proximity of a working cell tower some distance away but it is an effort.

They managed to get a generator somehow, but couldn't keep it running long enough to do a load of laundry (bad gas, mebbe).

They operate an AirBnB, and she says they are really missing regular access to the Internet because so many hotels are not up and running, and they can't take advantage of offering housing for relief workers because no one can find them or get in touch with them.
 
Meadmaker said:
the anti-statehood parties called for a boycott of the vote. Turnout was 23%, and about 97% of that was for statehood.
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Ah, thanks, was unaware.
Sherkeu said:
My theory:
The bottom line is that a modern supply chain doesn't function without electricity. It barely limps.
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Yep. It's part of what we used to call "backbone infrastructure" in contingency plans for humanitarian relief. (Military side).
quadraginta said:
Her latest report from him is that they have running water (don't know if potable) but no electricity. He can call her by getting within proximity of a working cell tower some distance away but it is an effort.

They operate an AirBnB, and she says they are really missing regular access to the Internet because so many hotels are not up and running, and they can't take advantage of offering housing for relief workers because no one can find them or get in touch with them.
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Thanks, interesting report. That small business piece strikes hard.

In the area were Harvey hit, within 20 miles of Rockport, quite a few people have no job to go back to. They are economically displaced as well as dealing with damage to or loos of a home. See also in places like Refugio (Nolan Ryan's home town) and Port Aransas, which relies a lot on the tourist trade.
 
alfaniner said:
"Puerto Rico is throwing our budget out of whack."

"You only had what? 15, 16 people die? Texas had a lot more!"

:eek:
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Did no one tell him that Puerto Rico doesn't have the ability to count the loss of life yet? There's no updated information available on it. Also, really classy of him to blame hurricane victims for being hurricane victims.
 
"Every death is a horror," Trump said, "but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous -- hundreds and hundreds of people that died -- and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering ... no one has ever seen anything like this."

--- Trump.
 
Molinaro said:
"Every death is a horror," Trump said, "but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous -- hundreds and hundreds of people that died -- and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering ... no one has ever seen anything like this."

--- Trump.
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Seeing the full quote, in context, makes it in some ways better, and some ways worse, than I thought.

It's better because it's not so jaw-droppingly insensitive as it seemed. He wasn't minimizing their problem. He was praising them for doing a good job in the face of an immense challenge. Poor choice of words, perhaps, but still "presidential".

The worse part is that it shows he is still not in touch with the reality of the situation. That death toll report is several days old. Many more have died since then. How do I know? Because in a population of over 3 million people, there are a fair number of vulnerable people. People on respirators, oxygen, insulin, things that just don't appear. Not everyone will have gotten what they need because they didn't have electricity, or they had a generator but no gas for it.

Hospital emergency rooms and trauma centers exist because they save lives. When the emergency room is closed or is inaccessible by road, some people are not going to make it, that would have made it under normal circumstances. People who go to doctor's offices for some little unexplained pain or fever are sometimes whisked to the hospital because it isn't just the flu. That didn't happen somewhere, because the doctor's office was closed. We don't have to speculate on whether or not that happened. In a population that size, we know it will happen. We just don't know how often it happened. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't seem to realize it happened.

I heard Hannity yapping on the radio today. He was whining about the unfair treatment that Mr. President was getting in the media. He emphasized that they did exactly for Maria as they had done for Irma and Harvey. Yes, Sean, they did. That's the problem.


Meanwhile, DoE still lists "at least" 5.4% as the number of people with power. Hannity said 30%. I wonder where he got his numbers. Is it a legitimate number, but includes the number of people on generator power? I'd like to see a source, but that is, once again, where I will fault the media. Hard numbers and real analysis are not their forte. They prefer the human side, focusing on one person's struggles, and of course on any political controversy that arises. It's interesting, but not very informative.
 
Meadmaker said:
Seeing the full quote, in context, makes it in some ways better, and some ways worse, than I thought.

It's better because it's not so jaw-droppingly insensitive as it seemed. He wasn't minimizing their problem. He was praising them for doing a good job in the face of an immense challenge. Poor choice of words, perhaps, but still "presidential".
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No. He was praising HIMSELF for the low death toll.

Meadmaker said:
The worse part is that it shows he is still not in touch with the reality of the situation. That death toll report is several days old. Many more have died since then. How do I know? Because in a population of over 3 million people, there are a fair number of vulnerable people. People on respirators, oxygen, insulin, things that just don't appear. Not everyone will have gotten what they need because they didn't have electricity, or they had a generator but no gas for it.
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To be fair to Trump, he was sitting next to the governor, asked him if the number was 17, and the governor said 16.

Meadmaker said:
Hospital emergency rooms and trauma centers exist because they save lives. When the emergency room is closed or is inaccessible by road, some people are not going to make it, that would have made it under normal circumstances. People who go to doctor's offices for some little unexplained pain or fever are sometimes whisked to the hospital because it isn't just the flu. That didn't happen somewhere, because the doctor's office was closed. We don't have to speculate on whether or not that happened. In a population that size, we know it will happen. We just don't know how often it happened. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't seem to realize it happened.

I heard Hannity yapping on the radio today. He was whining about the unfair treatment that Mr. President was getting in the media. He emphasized that they did exactly for Maria as they had done for Irma and Harvey. Yes, Sean, they did. That's the problem.
Meanwhile, DoE still lists "at least" 5.4% as the number of people with power. Hannity said 30%. I wonder where he got his numbers.
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Same place he gets what he dumps in the toilet each morning.
Meadmaker said:
Is it a legitimate number, but includes the number of people on generator power? I'd like to see a source, but that is, once again, where I will fault the media. Hard numbers and real analysis are not their forte. They prefer the human side, focusing on one person's struggles, and of course on any political controversy that arises. It's interesting, but not very informative.
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Please don't get me wrong. That was a good post. I'll go nom it, I think.
 
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