FEMA chief: Too much blame around on Puerto Rico deaths

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s disaster relief chief said Sunday that “the numbers are all over the place” from studies on the death toll in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria, keeping the issue in focus after President Donald Trump questioned the widely accepted count.

“There’s just too much blame going around,” said the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Brock Long, and “we need to be focused on what is Puerto Rico going to look like tomorrow.”

As his agency dealt with Florence in the Carolinas, Long found himself answering questions on the Sunday news shows about the storm that hit the U.S. territory last September.

Trump tweeted this past week that “3000 people did not die” in Maria and that death count was inflated “by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible,” by adding unrelated deaths to the toll from causes such as old age.

Independent researchers at George Washington University estimated that 2,975 excess deaths were related to Maria in the six months following the hurricane. Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosello, commissioned the study and accepted the death toll as the best available.

Months ago, the Rossello administration stopped updating its official death toll at 64 and ordered the independent investigation amid suspicions the dead were substantially undercounted.