Puerto Rico aid efforts still tangled

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO The Auxilio Mutuo Hospital here can’t figure out how to get specialized medical supplies from the nearby airport. A Puerto Rican in Tampa found the quickest way to deliver help to her hometown was to do it in person. And shipping containers filled with emergency goods are piling up at the Port of San Juan.

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated this U.S. territory in the Caribbean, individuals and charities on the U.S. mainland trying to send supplies to the island are facing a series of bottlenecks that is keeping help from reaching those most in need.

The barriers range from a lack of communication to blocked roads to a shortage of vehicles and drivers to make deliveries.

As a result, one Port of San

Juan terminal is storing 3,400 containers — more than double the usual number, said Jose “Pache” Ayala, vice president and general manager for Puerto Rico at Crowley Maritime Corp.

Because of tangled power lines across roads, washed-out bridges and highways and knocked-out cellphone towers and radio antennas across the island, supplies are leaving the Crowley terminal gate at 70% the rate before the storm, Ayala said.

The backlog affects goods and equipment from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, such as food and bottled water, bucket trucks, front-end loaders, 275,000 gallons of diesel fuel and 75,000 gallons of gasoline.

“That relief cargo has priority,” Ayala said. The backlog also affects commercial cargo such as building materials and medications that also are in great demand, he said.

“It’s easier to help internationally than it is in Puerto Rico,” said Neil Frame of Operation USA in Los Angeles. The nonprofit, which ships donated medical supplies into disaster areas around the world, has not yet found a way to deliver goods to the U.S. territory.

His group is shipping supplies to Mexico after last month’s earthquake and helping in Texas after Hurricane Harvey, but there it was easy: Workers just drove down and found people who could help distribute.

Because of poor communications since Maria struck here Sept. 20, his group has been able to connect with only eight of about 60 hospitals on the island. “You know that the ones that really need it are the ones we haven’t

been able to talk to,” he said.

He has neonatal equipment one hospital is waiting for and plans to ship pharmaceuticals that have a shelf life, so they will not last if they wait in port.

Communications are still spotty and a major impediment for shippers and truckers. “There are some packages sent by family to someone in Puerto Rico that because communications are so bad the person here doesn’t know (it’s coming),” Ayala said.

Trucker Ricardo Carbonell, 42, said damaged roads, downed trees and low-hanging power lines form another obstacle to get goods to those in need. And his company won’t deliver if dispatchers can’t get ahold of the recipient in advance.

“If there’s no communications, they call and call, nobody answers the phone, and we don’t bring them anything,” he said.

At Auxilio Mutuo Hospital, the only facility performing heart surgery on the island, administrators are having difficulty getting the specialized supplies needed for transplant patients.

“The issue is how do we get it

from the airport to here,” said Carlos Méndez, associate administrator at Auxilio Mutuo. “We cannot communicate with anyone at the airport.”

Michael Fernandez, executive director at CARAS de las Americas, said some shipments languish for more than a week until the usual import tax is lifted for emergency aid.

Liza Minnelli Pacheco, 43, a native of Guayanilla who now lives in Tampa, said Puerto Ricans want to send goods to relatives but don’t know what to send or how to arrange for the items to be picked up or delivered.

She and her friends in Florida from Guayanilla scrimped to raise money to deliver the aid in person. She traveled to her hometown on the hard-hit southern coast of Puerto Rico with a cooler full of insulin, some of which she gave to a city worker for a resident who had run out of her medicine.

“If a family in the U.S. wants to send things, it’s difficult,” Minnelli Pacheco said.