On Thursday, FEMA released its official after-action report about the agency’s response to Hurricane Maria. Surprisingly, they publicly admitted to what Puerto Ricans know all too well—that the agency failed to properly respond to the humanitarian crisis caused by the Category 4 hurricane on the island almost ten months ago.
The report details how FEMA had a lack of experienced personnel coupled with too few aid supplies. They also had difficulty coordinating logistics and working with the local government officials on the ground, who were dealing with the impact of the storm on themselves and their own families. According to FEMA, its lack of preparedness was because the agency was responding to back-to-back disasters: Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida. As a result, it was understaffed, overspent and not ready to properly respond to Hurricane Maria. According to agency estimates, between those three hurricanes, the wildfires in California and other natural disasters, the total cost was nearly $300 billion.
Given that there are many rural, isolated parts of Puerto Rico, FEMA also acknowledges that it suffered from an inability to communicate with those areas of the island which made it difficult to understand the hurricane’s impact. As Arelis R. Hernández writes in The Washington Post: “FEMA officials conceded that in the first 72 hours after the hurricane, they had little understanding of what was happening across the island and could not assess road conditions or damage to water and wastewater facilities.” But even after the first few days, they were still unable to fully understand the full extent of the devastation. One week later, the agency had only done assessments for half of the island’s water treatment sites. Additionally, out of 69 hospitals on the island, FEMA only had information on the status of 32 of them.
It’s great that FEMA is owning up to its mistakes. But the transparency is too little, too late and doesn’t actually do anything to help Puerto Rico continue to rebuild. The agency is still trying to throw displaced hurricane victims out of the hotels they are temporarily housed in. And the island is right in the middle of hurricane season, with possible hurricanes on the way—which no one is ready or prepared for. Moreover, Donald Trump has not once admitted that he lied about the response in Puerto Rico, previously playing down the extent of the damage, praising FEMA for its response and saying that the disaster was not “a real catastrophe like Katrina.” And, of course, Puerto Ricans and the rest of us won’t forget that he blamed Puerto Ricans for being lazy, wanting a handout and for “throwing the budget out of whack.”
We know that Trump will never admit that he lied and said stupid, hateful dangerous things that likely facilitated the agency’s terrible response to this disaster. But now that FEMA is finally admitting that it didn’t do its job properly, can we finally get the people of Puerto Rico the help that they need and deserve? It’s been almost ten months and people on the island are still without power, clean water, and repaired roofs. Enough is enough already.
