FEMA chief: Puerto Rico hurricane death toll ‘hard to tell’

Washington — Embattled FEMA Administrator William “Brock” Long said Sunday that the figures for how many people died as a result of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year are “all over the place,” in remarks that echoed President Donald Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on a George Washington University study that found there were nearly 3,000 excess deaths on the island in the months after the storm.

“It’s hard to tell what’s accurate and what’s not,” Long said in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” He made similar remarks in appearances on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

Puerto Rican authorities have accepted the results of the GWU study.

Long also did not dispute Trump’s incorrect claim that Democrats raised the death toll to make the president “look as bad as possible,” telling NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I don’t know why the studies were done.”

He cast doubt on the GWU study, suggesting that researchers took into account deaths due to a range of causes with tenuous links to Hurricane Maria, such as automobile crashes and domestic violence.

“You might see more deaths indirectly occur as time goes on, because people have heart attacks due to stress, they fall off their house trying to fix their roof, they die in car crashes because they went through an intersection where the stoplights weren’t working . ... Spousal abuse goes through the roof. You can’t blame spousal abuse after a disaster on anybody,” Long said on “Meet the Press.”

He contended that the crucial figure is “direct deaths — which is the wind, the water and the waves, buildings collapsing.”

Long’s remarks came after Trump on Thursday denied large-scale casualties from Hurricane Maria. “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” Trump tweeted. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths.”

Trump also claimed that “if a person died for any reason, like old age,” the researchers would “just add them onto the list.”