Leave it to an Illinois congressman, Luis Gutiérrez, to shed a little light on what’s happening in PR.
While I can find the speech on the congressman’s website, the only paper I’ve found it in is a local PR newspaper.
www.sanjuanweeklypr.com/…
First, let’s put aside all deniers (as if that was really necessary):
The U.S. congressman said he spoke with Chicago firefighters earlier this week who volunteered to go to Puerto Rico, and they reported that things are “worse than we are being told.”
While things may be improving along the coasts, it’s a different story in the mountains.
“[T]hey said they are still making contact with towns wherepeople come up to them and say ‘Thank God, FEMA is finally here.’”
“And they have to tell them, ‘No, we’re not from FEMA, we’re from Chicago,’”
So, what’s the problem? There’s nobody cutting through the red tape. The FEMA procedures for all events, small to large, are to manage the events from the bottom-up. People at the top will support needs from those below, but the folks below have to make formal requests for what they need. Normally this keeps waste down and focuses limited resources, which is good. For Maria, the normal process is not working.
Gutiérrez said that under Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) procedures, the federal government will not take on a task unless the governor [Ricardo Rosselló Nevares] asks them to do so.
“But the governor is unlikely to call for an evacuation for two reasons: Number 1, it is a difficult request for any local official to make,” Gutiérrez said. “Captains of industry and leaders on the island want to make sure there are Puerto Rican workers there to rebuild and to buy their products. I get that. But those same captains of industry and political leaders have already in most cases gotten their relatives off the island to safety. But, Number2, we know the governor has to be extremely careful how he asks for anything because we all know the president does not take criticism very well -- or even the hint of criticism. The governor doesn’t want to get black-balled by the president, who might go off on a Twitter rant at any moment unless he is praised and stroked every step of the way.”
[...]
“I think FEMA and the U.S. military can do the job, they just need the orders from the people incharge.”
I’ll stop there for fair use. But the last paragraph in the article is awesome if you follow the link.
If Rosselló Nevares is not asking for evacuations, it seems like he is also not asking for other things that PR needs.
We have the resources we could bring to bear. But we are not engaging them, like with the USNS Comfort ship only taking on a handful of patients. We need more tenacity at the top to get things moving. And we need to put the red tape and fragile ego aside to get things done. This isn’t a game, lives are at stake.
On another topic, what’s up with the power supply in PR? From the status.pr website they’ve been ping-pongig between 9 and 17% the last couple of days:
www.washingtonpost.com/…
WTF?