Aid effort a race against time
United States President Donald Trump pledged to spare no effort to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria’s ruinous aftermath yesterday, even as San Juan’s mayor, her voice breaking with rage, accused his administration of ‘‘killing us with the inefficiency’’.
Carmen Yulin Cruz implored Trump to ‘‘make sure somebody is in charge that is up to the task of saving lives’’, while the president asserted that US officials and emergency personnel were working all-out against daunting odds, with ‘‘incredible’’ results.
Trump’s acting homeland security secretary, Elaine Duke, visited Puerto Rico yesterday, surveying the ravaged landscape by helicopter and offering encouragement to some of the 10,000 emergency personnel she says the US government has on the island.
Duke tried to move on from remarks in which she called the federal relief effort a ‘‘good news story’’. She drew a sharp rebuke from Cruz for seeming to play down the suffering.
‘‘When you don’t have food for a baby, it’s not a good news story,’’ Cruz said. ‘‘Damn it, this is not a good news story. This is a peopleare-dying story. This is a life-ordeath story.
‘‘We are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency. I am begging, begging anyone that can hear us, to save us from dying.’’
Trump said he was not aware of Duke’s remark.
Thousands of Puerto Ricans finally received water and food rations yesterday as an aid bottleneck began to ease, but many remain cut off from the basic necessities of life and are desperate for power, communications and other trappings of normality.
Many people across the island, especially outside the capital, are still unable to get water, petrol or generator fuel. Military trucks laden with water bottles and other supplies began to reach some remote parts of Puerto Rico, and US federal officials pointed to progress with the recovery effort.
In some cases, aid being distributed by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is simply not enough to meet the demand on an island of 3.4 million people where nearly everyone is still without power, half are without running water in their homes and the economy is still crippled from the effects of the storm that swept across the US territory as a fierce Category September 20.
‘‘There is a disconnect between what the FEMA people are saying is happening and what the mayors and the people in the towns know that is happening,’’ said Cruz, who has been living in a shelter since her own home was flooded.
Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, ‘‘Help us. We are dying,’’ she said she was hopeful that the situation would improve, but added: ‘‘People can’t fathom what it is to have children drinking from creeks, to have people in hurricane on nursing homes without oxygen.’’
Governor Ricard Rossello and other officials said they were aware of people’s deepening frustration and of the difficulty, and dangers, of living on a sweltering tropical island with no air conditioning and little to no water. He blamed some of the delay on the logistical challenge of getting aid shipments out of seaports and airports, which were knocked out of commission by the storm, and then distributing the supplies on debris-strewn streets.
Rossello said the government would seize all food still sitting in containers at the port that private business owners had not yet claimed and would distribute it to people for free. He said the government would use FEMA funds to repay the owners.
There were signs that Puerto Rico was slowly emerging from the disaster. Telecommunications were back for about 30 per cent of the island. Nearly half of all supermarkets had reopened, at least on reduced hours, and about 60 per cent of petrol stations, though it could take hours to buy