Puerto Ricans struggle to survive
puerto rico: Brian Jimenez had burned through dwindling supplies of fuel on a 45-minute drive in search of somewhere to fill his grandmother’s blood thinner prescription. He ended up in Fajardo, a scruffy town of strip malls on the northeastern tip, where a line of 400 waited outside a Walmart.
The store had drawn desperate crowds of storm victims who had heard it took credit or debit cards and offered customers US$20 (RM84) cash back – a lifeline in an increasingly cashless society.
Store employees allowed customers in, one by one, for rationed shopping trips of 15 minutes each.
Then, at noon, the store closed after its generator croaked and before Jimenez could get inside to buy his grandmother’s medicine.
“Every day we say, ‘ What’s the thing that we need the most today?’ and then we wait in a line for that,” said Jimenez, a 24-year-old medical student from Ponce, on the island’s southern coast.
After Hurricane Maria crippled this impoverished US territory, residents scrambled for all the staples of modern society – food, water, fuel, medicine and cash – in a grinding survival struggle that has gripped Puerto Ricans across social classes.
For days now, residents have awoken each morning to decide which lifeline they should pursue: fuel at the few open stations, food and bottled water at the few grocery stores with fuel for generators, or scarce cash at the few operating banks or ATMs.
The pursuit of just one of these essentials can consume an entire day – if the mission succeeds at all – as hordes of increasingly desperate residents wait in 12-hour lines.
As criticism mounts about a slow disaster response by President Donald Trump’s administration, residents in Fajardo said they had seen little if any presence from the federal government.
Across the island, the sporadic presence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the US military stood in sharp contrast to their comparatively ubiquitous presence after hurricanes Harvey and Irma recently hit Texas and Florida.
The severe shortages have thrown even relatively affluent Puerto Ricans into the same plight as the hundreds of thousands of poor residents. The broad humanitarian crisis highlights the extreme difficulty of getting local or federal disaster relief to a remote US island territory with an already fragile infrastructure and deeply indebted government.
Even those with money now cannot often access it or find places open and supplied to spend it as stores are shuttered for lack of electric power, diesel for generators, supplies or employees. — Reuters