Fatal flaws
doubts surround P.r. death count
SAN JUAN — Even as they’ve acknowledged a spike in deaths since Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s government is still counting just 55 fatalities from the storm — which has many skeptical that they’re telling the truth.
“Just that we have that discussion is a big issue,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz told the Daily News on Thursday. “There shouldn’t be any concern or discussion.”
Cruz first spoke about the death toll about a week ago, revealing that there had been 911 cremations without autopsies in the wake of the storm — something she said raised serious questions. Secretary of the Department of Public Safety Héctor Pesquera called the mayor’s comments “irresponsible,” and Cruz said the response was telling.
“The problem is, when you answer a question with an insult, it’s obviously because you don’t have the truth on your side,” she said.
On Wednesday, the island's territorial government acknowledged that there had, indeed, been more deaths than usual in the months since Maria.
Puerto Rico recorded 2,838 deaths in September, an increase of 472 from the same month in 2016. The average death rate increased from 82 per day in the two weeks before Maria, to 117 in the two weeks afterward. The storm hit on Sept. 20.
Electricity remains rare in Puerto Rico, particularly following the failure of a transmission line on Thursday that plunged much of San Juan and the surrounding areas back into darkness — and into the heat, which leaves babies and the elderly especially vulnerable.
The line was managed by Whitefish, the tiny Montana utility that initially won the massive contract to work on the island before it was canceled amid outcry. That, too, has slowed down efforts to restore power.
On Thursday, the director of the island’s Emergency Management Agency resigned from his post. The director, Abner Gomez, had come under criticism for taking a vacation less than a month after the hurricane ravaged the island.
“The botched response to the hurricane perhaps, in terms of the death toll, has been even more devastating than the actual hurricane,” Cruz said.
Mili Bonilla, 60, said her father was taken to the hospital two days after the storm with respiratory issues and fluid in his lungs.
“The hospital had to transfer him because they ran out of oxygen,” said Bonilla, who lives in the Bronx and works for Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, as she visited a San Juan community kitchen on Thursday.
When she arrived on the island, her father was doing fine, she said. But a day later he was on a respirator, and within a week he was dead.
“This is an indirect hit of the hurricane, when you have direct hits, and indirect hits,” she said. “His death is now — it will not be counted as hurricane effected. It was related.”