U.S. appoints general to oversee military response to Puerto Rico disaster
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, (Reuters) - The Pentagon appointed a senior general to oversee military relief operations in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, even as President Donald Trump’s administration faced calls from lawmakers for a far more robust response to the disaster.
The U.S. territory of 3.4 million people is reeling from Hurricane Maria, which struck on Sept. 20 as the most powerful storm to hit the island in nearly 90 years, causing widespread flooding, completely cutting power and heavily damaging homes, roads and other infrastructure.
The storm claimed more than 30 lives across the Caribbean, including at least 16 in Puerto Rico. Governor Ricardo Rossello has called the scope
of the island’s devastation unprecedented.
The U.S. military, which has poured some 4,400 troops into the relief effort, including the Puerto Rico National Guard, named Lieutenant General Jeffrey Buchanan to oversee its response on the island.
Buchanan, Army chief for the military’s U.S. Northern Command, was expected to arrive in Puerto Rico later on Thursday. He will be the Pentagon’s main liaison with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. government’s lead agency on the island, and focus on aid distribution, the Pentagon said in a statement.
FEMA has placed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of rebuilding the island’s crippled power grid.
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, like Trump a Republican, had earlier called for appointment of a single authority to oversee all hurricane relief efforts, and said the Defense Department should mostly be in charge.
“I’m arguing that at least when it comes to logistics the federal government is going to have to lead, and they’re going to have to put someone there with the authority to make these decisions and execute on them fairly quickly,” Rubio told CNN.
Democratic U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said the crisis was shifting from a natural disaster to a man-made one, adding that the government’s response had been “shamefully slow and undersized and should be vastly upgraded and increased.”
Speaking on the Senate floor, he called for as many as 50,000 troops “not to occupy the island, not to enforce martial law” but to coordinate logistics and the delivery of aid and basic necessities.
Even as FEMA and the U.S. military have stepped up relief efforts, many residents in Puerto Rico have been frustrated over the prolonged lack of electricity, drinking water and other essentials.
Radamez Montañez, a building administrator from the municipality of Carolina, east of capital city San Juan, said he had been without water and electricity at home since Hurricane Irma grazed the island two weeks before Maria. “It’s chaos, total chaos,” he said.
Defending the relief effort, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said 10,000 federal relief workers had arrived in Puerto Rico, including troops, and that 44 of the island’s 69 hospitals were now fully operational.