Campaign Action
Take a moment to stop and think about how often you and your family drink clean water — either from the tap or bought in bottles. How often do you bathe or shower, brush your teeth, wash your hair and clothes, and flush your toilet? We tend to take these water facts of daily life for granted.
Now imagine what it is like in Puerto Rico, where over half of the island’s residents still don’t have access to running water, and those that do cannot trust the quality of that water. Think about being warned to boil all your water, even water that you bathe in, and how frustrating (and frightening) that is if you don’t have a functioning stove, because power is still out on most of the island, or if you have run out of propane. Imagine waiting in the heat and humidity for hours, just to get a ration of water that may not last till tomorrow.
Boil water problem:
Isabel Rullán, co-founder and managing director of ConPRmetidos, a non-profit group, said even if people have running water, they may not have the power or means to boil or purify it. The non-profit, which focuses on fostering personal, social, and economic development of Puerto Rican communities, is raising money for long-term relief efforts.
No wonder we are seeing tweets like this from the mayor of San Juan:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued this “Maria Update for Puerto Rico” on Oct. 7.
Water Safety
Raw sewage continues to be released into waterways and is expected to continue until repairs can be made and power is restored. Water contaminated with livestock waste, human sewage, chemicals, and other contaminants can lead to illness when used for drinking, bathing, and other hygiene activities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people should not use the water from rivers, streams and coastal water to drink, bathe, wash, or to cook with unless first boiling this water for a minimum of one minute. If boiling the water is not possible, water may be disinfected with bleach
This is of course, on a website that most people in PR cannot access, just as they cannot access the mirror site in Spanish.
Meanwhile we have seen hundreds of photos of people bathing in streams. We know that flood waters filled houses with muck and mud and that people are trying to clean up, and they aren’t wearing masks and gloves.
I read this lead in a NY Times article and cried
LAS MARÍAS, P.R. — Inside a dark school sheltering families left homeless by landslides and hurricane winds, bottled water was getting so scarce on Monday that relief workers parceled out one small plastic cup to go with each person’s dinner of hot dogs, rice and beans and syrupy apricots.
“This is the ration,” Thomas Bosque, 60, whose roof was torn off in the storm, said, lifting his cup.
A little review:
Hurricane Maria smashed into Puerto Rico, the home of 2.5 million American citizens on September 20 leaving massive damage in her wake, and leaving the people with no power, no water, and almost no communication. In the timeline of events and relief efforts, this was only two short weeks after Hurricane Irma had also swept by Puerto Rico, Irma “cuts off power to about two-thirds of the island’s electricity customers, and about 34 percent of its population loses access to clean water”
We are now 20 days into the Maria part of the timeline.
What is happening in Puerto Rico is slipping from the headlines — except in areas which have large mainland Puerto Rican populations, like New York City
Some water history:
In May of 2017, NBC posted this report: Puerto Rico’s Drinking Water at Brink of Crisis
Puerto Rico's drinking water system is on the brink of crisis, an environmental group said Wednesday. Elevated lead levels, bacteria, chemicals and lax adherence to regulations have created a toxic mix for the American territory's 3 million-plus citizens,Natural Resources Defense Council Health Director Erik Olson told NBC News,citing his group's latest research.
"Puerto Rico just clearly has the biggest challenges of any state or territory in the United States," Olson said.
The drinking water fails lead safety regulations, while 70 percent of the island is served by water that violates federal health standards. The government-run water utility also routinely fails to conduct the required safety tests, while failing the safety tests they do conduct, according to anew NRDC report.Following the NRDC's May water safety report, data provided to NBC News showed San Juan, Puerto Rico to be the worst big-city water system in the nation. There, the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) had more violations than any other big city, with64 safety violations, including 24 different health violations, in 2015. And Olson said he expects the situation to deteriorate further, because President Donald Trump's has proposed big cuts to Environmental Protection Agency programs that fund the Puerto Rican water system and federal safety enforcement mechanisms.
We know that Trump and his Republican enablers are a disaster, and it gets worse daily.
There is a disconnect between what Trump crows (lies) about and what is actually happening on the ground.
Your voices have made make a difference.
FEMA removes — then restores — statistics about drinking water access and electricity in Puerto Rico from website
Update: As of Friday afternoon, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is once again reporting two key statistics -- the percentage of Puerto Ricans who have access to drinking water and the percentage of the island that has power -- on its webpage tracking the federal response to Hurricane Maria.
As of Wednesday, half of Puerto Ricans had access to drinking water and 5 percent of the island had electricity, according to statistics published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on its Web page documenting the federal response to Hurricane Maria.
By Thursday morning, both of those key metrics were no longer on the Web page.
The island remains in a water crisis that will not go away quickly.
Report: Puerto Rico’s Drinking Water at Brink of Crisis
Luis Morales lives atop a steep hill where the bloated creek destroyed his driveway, cutting him and his sister off from the main road.
They have had to rely on their brother, Miguel Morales, who lives in another town, to drive as close as he can to deliver jugs of water. There, the brothers meet every so often to cross the sediment-filled creek bed and replenish the family water supply.
“They can’t use this water,” Miguel Morales said indignantly, pointing to the brown, murky stream flowing beneath them. He said he has seen women bathe their children in the water that flows through the town of Utuado, water that carries sewage, trash and pollutants. In some places where the roads are gone, people are using ropes to cross rivers or embankments to get to the more-populated areas where they can find bottled water, but it can be an all-day operation in towns like these.
One of the many “non-US Government” efforts to help:
The water crisis is linked to other looming public health problems.
One More Thing For Puerto Rico To Worry About: Disease-Ridden Mosquitoes
The natural disaster has drawn attention to deeper political and financial inequalities between Puerto Rico — a U.S. territory — and U.S. states such as Florida and Texas, which are having an easier time returning to normal after their recent hurricane experiences. Unfortunately, there could be more trouble ahead, in the form of tiny tropical mosquitoes. Experts say the combination of natural disasters and persistent socioeconomic inequality creates an environment where mosquito-borne diseases — such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika — can spread.
All those diseases exist in Puerto Rico in the background of everyday life, occasionally flaring up into full-blown epidemics. Dengue, a virus that causes fever and joint pain, was diagnosed in 174 people in Puerto Rico in 2016 and none in the first half of 2017. But in bad years — 1994, 1998, 2007 and 2010, among them — it has infected more than 10,000. The same is true of other mosquito-borne diseases on the island. Zika, infamously, was epidemic in 2016, with more than 40,000 people diagnosed in Puerto Rico. By this June, though, cases of the disease had fallen to nearly nothing, and the epidemic was declared over.
It’s not always clear what factors make the difference between a year in which mosquito-borne disease is negligible and one in which it’s epidemic. But hurricanes alone aren’t necessarily big predictors, said Ben Beard, deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases. The floods and winds that come with a storm kill mosquitoes and wash away their breeding grounds, and it’s not uncommon for a big hurricane to disrupt an outbreak in progress by temporarily cutting the local mosquito population off at the knees. But that effect is short-lived. “Within a week or so, you tend to see the situation come back to where it was before the storm,” he said. “Several weeks after that, you’ll see some increase.” At that point, it starts to matter how a society has weathered the storm and how quickly it is recovering. The longer people live without solid roofs, intact window screens and air conditioning — and the longer they’re forced to spend large amounts of time outdoors rebuilding — the more likely it is that a storm will, indirectly, bring people and insects together.
In Puerto Rico, Health Concerns Grow Amid Lack of Clean Water, Medical Care
Floodwaters can contain toxic chemicals, be harmful to human health and be vectors for infectious diseases, like E.coli, according to Jill Johnston, an expert in hazardous waste and wastewater at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. Standing water can serve as breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which carry viruses like dengue and Zika.
Eunice Vargas, who lives in Levittown, a suburb west of San Juan, said a nearby channel overflowed following the storm, flooding streets and homes. The floodwaters were teeming with fish, worms, trash, oil and excrement, she said.
“It was like a river of dirty water, sewage water,” said Ms. Vargas.
Clearly, the water system needs to be fixed and brought up to safe water standards — which will all depend on the amount of aid granted to Puerto Rico by the U.S. Congress.
Temporary (which may mean many months) solutions are being offered.
Ultimately it will be our voices (and votes), here on the mainland that will make the difference between life and death, suffering and succor for our brothers and sisters on the island.
Think of Puerto Rico every time you lift a glass, or bottle to your lips to take a drink of clean water.
Contact your elected officials in Washington D.C. and demand that they take a stand for Puerto Rico!