With 85 percent of Puerto Rico still without power and current projections showing only 30 percent up and running by November 1, the plan put forward by Governor Ricardo Rosselló seems ambitious.
Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said he hopes that power will be restored to 95% of the island's energy grid by December 15.
"This is an aggressive agenda, but we cannot be sort of passive in the face of Puerto Rico's challenges," Rosselló said. "We are going to need all hands on deck."
It’s an aggressive agenda, and also a necessary one. Even those areas where the water system is up and running are under a boil order — something that’s difficult to comply with when there’s no electricity and tens of thousands of homes have been destroyed. Resources are still so scarce that last week it was reported that people in part of the island were even lining up to drink water pumped from a Superfund site polluted with chemicals that damage the liver and can cause cancer.
Friday afternoon, CNN watched workers from the Puerto Rican water utility, Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados, or AAA, distribute water from a well at the Dorado Groundwater Contamination Site, which was listed in 2016 as part of the federal Superfund program for hazardous waste cleanup.
Governor Rosselló’s aggressive timetable reflects a race to provide vital services to Americans still at grave risk. Meanwhile Trump’s statements on Puerto Rico over the last week included declaring that that island was already dysfunctional before the hurricanes and blaming the island’s fiscal disaster on the people who are living with it — or dying with it — rather than the hedge fund managers who made millions off of misery.
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With the eager help of investment bankers and an insatiable demand for triple tax exempt bonds ... Puerto Rico began to aggressively expand its debt portfolio with novel debt instruments. …
By 2014 Puerto Rico needed to restructure a Gordian knot of debt instruments with incompatible and competing terms, a state of affairs much more comparable to nations than states—a whopping $73 billion in bonds and another $30 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. …
Were Puerto Rico a state, the normal course of events to restructure the debt would have been that followed by Michigan when Detroit found itself with debt it could not repay: U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
Several things precluded Puerto Rico from going down this path: First and foremost was that Puerto Rico was removed from Chapter 9 eligibility of the 1984 U.S. Bankruptcy Code by an unknown party for unknown reasons.
That someone being a mystery person in Congress who wrote Puerto Rico into a trap that put the entire territory on a treadmill of issuing more and more high risk bonds at higher and higher interest rates, which were slurped up by hedge funds all too aware of Puerto Rico’s inability to seek relief in court. And as if that wasn’t bad enough …
… much of the infrastructure and assets behind the debt were destroyed by Maria. For example, PREPA, the island’s power company borrowed $8 billion largely to fund infrastructure that will now have to be rebuilt from scratch.
Puerto Rico’s electrical system is currently so fragile that even areas that have theoretically been restored are experiencing widespread outages. To achieve anything like the rapid restoration of the electrical grid the governor is suggesting will require federal intervention.
The US Army Corps of Engineers will have to play a key role in making this plan a reality, because they have the resources and can hire the manpower that the island's agencies lack, the governor said.
Which can happen and should happen. The only question is whether Trump will allow it to happen.
His recent tweets have suggested that he could scale back FEMA activities on Puerto Rico even though the stream of supplies they’re bringing in is the only lifeline some people have.
The best news is that, like every other actual decision he should be making, it appears Trump will likely take no action other than to punt to Congress.
So … Donald Trump has declared he’s nearing the end of dealing with ungrateful poor people who haven’t magically been able to generate food, water, and electricity. But the good news is he may actually be too lazy to give the order to let them starve. Instead, he’s ready to let Congress throw paper towels.
Puerto Rico is exactly the kind of situation that demands leadership. It’s not just a hurricane, it’s one of the most devastating storms in US history striking our nation in an area where delivering people and supplies is most difficult. A good enough response in this case isn’t good enough. Good enough has already gotten people killed. But of course, leadership requires a leader.
Trump seems to have opted out of everything to do with this job he didn’t want. Healthcare. Immigration. And now he figures he’s been sympathetic enough to people in life or death situations.
Six days—and 40 lives—after fires began to rage across California, Trump hasn’t mentioned them once. He’s made time to talk about an interview that Eric is doing, and to complain about an insufficiently flattering New York Times article, but Trump is simply disastered out. Americans will have to survive without him. He’s already thrown in the towel.
Fortunately, not everyone has given up.
The most recent aid to Puerto Rico after Maria was delivered by Rosana Guernica, a junior at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Guernica raised tens of thousands of dollars through crowdfunding and reserved a plane to deliver emergency supplies to Puerto Rico, her home. She bought thousands of pounds of supplies, such as baby formula, water, batteries and medicine.
Guernica started soliciting donations on YouCaring, a crowdfunding site, one week after Maria hit, and she raised $7,000 in 24 hours, according to The Associated Press. By the following day, she had raised $11,000. So far, 786 donors have contributed to the cause, and donations exceed $82,000. Her YouCaring page was shared 1,800 times on Facebook.
Now repeat that, about two million times.