The Mess in Puerto Rico. No power on the whole island for 4-6 mos.

It's a bad situation. But I am hearing of some very innovation solutions being developed to address the issues there, which will not only help PR, but create technologies/solutions that can be applied elsewhere, and could even spur new industries.

 

That's fair, and to be clear I wasn't trying to completely shut down the idea either. For sure statehood would help the island in that it would give them a lot more federal funding which would help them rebuild their infrastructure and do a better job of it this time. The issue ends up being how to build them a viable economy long term and I'm just not sure that can happen. I don't think they'll ever be a giant tourist location like Hawaii and they don't really have natural resources to fuel the economy that way. They even have basically every form of gambling legalized and it still doesn't help bring in the big bucks....I mean they've even looked into legalizing prostitution and mar1juana to make the island more attractive to certain tourists so I'll give them credit for trying, I just don't know what they can do that will work.

 

Puerto Rico blackout is now the second biggest of all time, counting by customer-hours lost: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/16/us/puerto-rico-blackout-second-largest-globally-trnd/index.html. Look at all the densely-populated but impoverished third-world countries it competes with. Hanging with the big boys of blackouts!

Meanwhile, Secretary Perry is considering invoking his emergency powers granted by section 202(c) to... force electricity customers in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest to pay a massive subsidy to keep defunct coal-fired power plants afloat so Trump patron Robert Murray doesn't have to file for bankruptcy. If ever there was a time to invoke emergency powers -- created to allow the DOE to act in times of crisis -- this has got to be it. Can't let rich people lose money when their big bets go bad. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...rgency-order-to-bail-out-coal-nuclear-plants/

 

Pretty embarrassing for Puerto Rico's government, it just shows what a terrible job they've done for decades. I can't see how ANYONE in that government could be elected again by the people of Puerto Rico now that it's obvious they have been squandering the budget on frivolous BS instead of what matters.

 

B-b-b-b-but Solyndra!!

Winners and Losers JV!

Winners.AND.Losers.

 

If they can't solve their own electrical problems, they need to get to work or self-deport!

 

Somebody posted it in one of the Trump threads, but I wanted to bump the Puerto Rico threads to give the subject the attention it deserves.

Hurricane Maria killed 4,600 people in Puerto Rico.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-hurricane-maria-deaths-20180529-story.html

Some of this impact is a credit to geography and meteorology because Maria just flattened Puerto Rico. But we took a far too casual attitude to the disaster as a country, especially as a federal government. Trump was patting himself on the back about how low the death toll was and saying that Maria wasn't a real disaster because it didn't kill more people. It killed more than Katrina, more than any natural disaster since the 1900 hurricane destroyed Galveston. I recognize the challenges of getting help to an island that has some rough geography and below average infrastructure, but our response should have been overwhelming when instead it was anemic. We may have saved a thousand people's lives by being more proactive.

 

Thanks for raising awareness of this.

And natch, the WH first thought is to defend and deflect...

White House defends FEMA after study finds Hurricane Maria killed 5,000 in Puerto Rico

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...puerto-rico-death-toll-white-house/656252002/

 

Misinformation and lies from Trump admin early on lessen political pressure to help. Media fail to raise the issue.

This admin didn’t care.

 

What metric can I judge this on? How to be proactive? Spend billions on puerto rico years ago? As I live in a city with a far lower white population than PR that was also recently hit by a hurricane the "government is racist and didn't help them" narrative falls short for me but I really want to know what you are basing this on.

I think FEMA sucks, how much more are we looking to spend.

 

Reminder of the lies.

President Donald Trump's visit to the stricken island in the storm's aftermath, tossing out paper towels and telling Puerto Rican officials they should be "very proud" that hundreds didn't die from Maria as in a "real catastrophe like Katrina."

 

So long as we don't blame those who are truly to blame for the state of Puerto Rico....their corrupt as hell government that squandered their budget for decades on BS instead of bulking up their infrastructure to withstand one of literally only 2 possible natural disasters they could possibly face.

 

Good to see you used "literally", because you would be exponentially wrong. As usual.

 

Smart argument, I'll consider it for what it's worth.

 

The very reason we have a federal government emergency response to a huge natural disaster is because precisely a natural disaster can wipe out the local infrastructure, local government, and local community that can no longer response themselves.

It is precisely that PR infrastructure is known to be weak and that it is an island were reasons for an urgent and serious federal prep right before the storm hit, and immediately after it hit as a historic powerful storm. Total failure of urgency and seriousness from the very top lead to much more preventable death than what the storm caused immediately.

 

Yes the admin is just lying abot the death toll, but the blame for the deaths is much more directly on the Puerto Rican local govt from everything I can tell. I don’t think there was very much from a logistical perspective that could have been been done to save many more lives by the US mainland. Is there something that lays out an exact short term strategy that could have been done to cut the death toll in half?

However, it’s all a strange situation that Puerto Rico is in because they are a territory. As we know Puerto Ricans don’t pay federal income taxes and they have their own local taxes. On top of that the younger people leave for the US because they have citizenship. Having US citizenship basically creates a brain drain siphon to the US and kind of turns the island into a zombie to a degree.

Also, is it generally accepted to determine official death tolls by using this method (year over year mortality rates in “x” number of months after the natural disaster) that the Harvard researchers used? It would seem to give a bigger picture of the mortality impact, but I didn’t know if that’s how other hurricane death tolls were measured.

 

This is just pitiful.
The fact that Flint Michigan still has poor drinking water
and
Puerto Rico still having infrastructure problem.

Rocket River

 

You're right there is no good metric on effort. We could have spent millions more and had the same result because the realities on the ground prevented effective deployment of resources. It's possible, but I don't really believe it. The narrative from the White House was that the disaster was not that bad, the severity was Puerto Rico's own fault (totally unlike Houston where we allowed unfettered development in a swamp, amirite?), that the federal government's responsibility was different because Puerto Rico is a territory and not a state. The message from the top was very clear -- we're not going to go all-out to help.

This isn't a race thing, btw. This is a right-wing prejudice that the US citizens in Puerto Rico are not 'real citizens' like the ones on the mainland.

Should we have spent billions on Puerto Rico years ago? Not exactly. Part of the disaster was the crappy infrastructure they have, which is their responsibility but they haven't been able to pay for it. They can't because of US policy that treats them like a foreign country for trade. I cannot understand why we would want to have policy that puts a US possession at a competitive disadvantage such that they are put at such risk of calamity. This is a distress cost now because we didn't want to pay for prevention earlier. All the payment would have entailed was to let things alone and allow US companies to leverage the cheaper labor in PR for US-based manufacture. They put the trade barrier up and forced companies to move operations elsewhere, including even cheaper central american countries. What might be the worst part is that we didn't learn anything from it. Puerto Rico still has their debt problem, and their electric grid was scotchtaped back together. Another hurricane is going to come and do this again sooner or later and it's going to cost us.

 

That's what happens when people elect incompetent and corrupt local governments that don't prioritize infrastructure.

 

Trump did his part. He's a true humanitarian. And very stable genius.