President can change monument boundaries.
From the comfort of the mainland, it is difficult to comprehend just how bad conditions are in Puerto Rico. Some 1.5 million people lack clean drinking water and must use bottled or bad water to clean, cook and drink. The island’s utility grid is destroyed, leaving customers without power unless, by some miracle, they have a generator and fuel to power it. Temperatures are hot and humid — in the 90s at some points — and there is no air conditioning.
Fuel, food and cellphone service are limited. Agriculture is decimated, with 80 percent of the crops gone. Hospitals are barely able to care for the sick, and individuals are worried that their life-saving insulin, for example, will spoil in the heat without refrigeration.
All this damage was caused by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm that made landfall Sept. 20 with winds of 150 miles per hour. Making the catastrophe worse is a dreadful lack of response from those in charge.
President Donald Trump has spent more time opining about the NFL and its player protests than he has directing aid to U.S. citizens in danger of dying in Puerto Rico. Because, yes, as our readers likely do know, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. (A poll by Morning Consult published in The New York Times last week revealed that 54 percent of Americans do not know that the 3.4 million Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, however. Knowledge matters, because the poll discovered that 81 percent of those who knew Puerto Ricans were citizens supported sending to aid to the island, as opposed to 44 percent of those who didn’t know.)
Trump’s classic response, likely to rank up there with President George W. Bush’s “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” after Hurricane Katrina, was this: “This is an island sitting in the middle of an ocean. And it’s a big ocean; it’s a very big ocean. And we’re doing a really good job.”
No, we are not doing “a really good job.” And that statement should include U.S. citizens on the mainland, too. Most of us can’t take off to Puerto Rico — as many New Mexicans did to help in Texas after Hurricane Harvey — but we can send money. Corporate donations for Hurricanes Irma and Harvey relief have exceeded $222 million, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while four companies have donated a collective $8.1 million to Puerto Rico. News coverage has seemed less robust than the hours of cable news devoted to Hurricane Katrina, and more recently, to Harvey and Irma.
Our government must increase aid, because U.S. might is necessary to help Puerto Rico come back from devastation — and assistance also is needed in the U.S. Virgin Islands and other parts of the Caribbean. We cannot afford disaster fatigue. Yet federal response to Maria has been sluggish, despite Trump’s claims that all is going well. Hillary Clinton had to nudge the president, tweeting the suggestion that the Navy hospital ship Comfort be sent to Puerto Rico; that is happening.
Waking up midweek, Trump increased the amount of funds available for Puerto Rico recovery and also authorized waiver of the Jones Act. (That’s a regulation requiring items shipped between American ports be moved in ships that are American-owned and worked by Americans; in contrast, that was done immediately for Harvey. His waiver is temporary and might need to be made permanent as Puerto Rico recovers.)
Here are other things that need to happen. The president can ask Congress to pass a relief package for Puerto Rico, one giving the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the island more money for rebuilding. Additional military resources must be sent to the island to help with search and rescue as well as logistics — with roads destroyed, delivering supplies is a nightmare. Helicopters will be required. A disaster declaration for the entire island was still waiting last week.
A point person finally was appointed to supervise, similar to what retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré did during the Katrina response. He helped save New Orleans. Weighing in on Puerto Rico, Honoré told Morning Edition that, “Puerto Rico is a bigger and tougher mission than Katrina. And we had 20,000 federal troops, 20 ships and 40,000 National Guard.” Honoré said forces need to be doubled from the 2,200 or so federal troops now on the island.
Making the situation worse is Puerto Rico’s massive debt and poor infrastructure. Before the storm hit, the island was struggling. Puerto Rico declared bankruptcy in May and has been attempting to restructure its billions in debt. The storm took an already weak region and brought the island to its knees.
Soon, as robust rebuilding gets underway, Congress must examine the status of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory and find a way to bring equality to this mistreated island. Perhaps if Puerto Rico were a state, people in the United States would understand it is part of this country; if nothing else, Washington might care more because island residents could vote for the office of president, not just in presidential primaries. They have so little clout.
Helping after the immediate disaster is complicated; rebuilding for the future likely will be even harder. But these are American citizens. This country owes them. We need to step up.