Puerto Rico: Private help, government failure
“I realized how bad things still were when I came across an old man by the side of the road who was surviving on rain water.” Reinier Beauchamp found that man
24 days after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, and of course he helped him.
Beauchamp, a 29-year-old publicist, has been coordinating a central Puerto Rico relief effort that he calls #CordilleraCentral. Why? Because a month after the hurricane hit, even when supplies have been delivered, the government has not managed to get them to remote places — or to places like where my parents live, about 16 miles from San Juan.
“The help is there … just sitting there” in San Juan, my parents told me in a shaky call. “Here in Toa Alta we haven’t seen any movement of aid.”
Adding insult to injury, CBS News reporter David Begnaud highlighted a video of Puerto Rican Secretary of State Luis Rivera Marin standing in a dumpster filled with boxes of food and gallons of water. “Mishandled aid,” as he called it, in the southern town of Patillas.
“I will tell you that everything that the president said that he was going to send to the island, it's getting there. The resources are there,” Puerto Rico’s delegate in Congress, Jenniffer GonzalezColon, said in an interview with me. Taking her at her word, the problem with recovery would then fall on emergency management workers at all levels, and the local government run by her
2016 ticket mate, Gov. Ricardo Rossello.
Rossello thanked artists, celebrities and private entities this week for their relief efforts. And rightfully so, because private citizens have clearly shown themselves to be more capable than the Federal Emergency Management Agency or Rossello’s team.
“Duracell had trucks and they were going around distributing batteries to every single person they encountered. And the local church was ... handing out basic necessities,” my mother told me.
A Real Housewives of New York star, Bethenny Frankel, was able to get dozens of planes with aid to remote places, transport people to hospitals, and form coalitions with strangers. Restaurateurs and chefs Jose Andres and Jose Enrique have been able to serve about 25,000 meals per day.
But the reality is that 1 million Americans on the island still don’t have running water, and 3 million don’t have power. Emergency responders have a responsibility to improve logistics and bring help where it’s needed, not just where it’s easy to get to or there’s the best photo-op for President Trump or House Speaker Paul Ryan.
The federal government is not doing Puerto Rico a favor by helping the island recover; that’s a federal responsibility. Local government shouldn’t count on the kindness of private citizens for their plans; it should mobilize workers in the areas every Puerto Rican already knows are in most need. Finally, in order to prevent another tragedy of this magnitude, Puerto Rico’s infrastructure needs to be rebuilt in a modernized manner.
It’s incredible that a Real Housewife could deliver aid where first responders and the military could not.