The never-ending saga of FEMA fail and U.S. government neglect and indifference to the ongoing tragedy in Puerto Rico continues.
FEMA’s own report admits to failures — and that report got “edited.”
See NY Times reporter Frances Robles excellent work on this:
Though I am glad to see that news agencies are covering the FEMA report, the question we need to ask is what is going to be done about it? Where are the calls for hearings? What is going to be done to ensure that the failures are going to be corrected?
Frankly, as it stands now, the answer is nothing is going to be done by the President, FEMA or Congress to fix the situation. Instead — it is going to get worse.
Thousands of people are still living under leaky tarps, and now Puerto Rico has entered a new hurricane season. We have already seen a power failure as a result of rainstorms which were an aftereffect of a storm which got named Beryl—though it petered out by the time it got to PR. About 60,000 people were without lights as a result of a little rain.
We know that a majority of the thousands of deaths that took place on the island — which are still under investigation— took place in hospitals which lost power.
Loss of power is directly related to loss of life.
So what has failed FEMA decided to do? They have instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the three mega back up generators they installed on the island.
This is so far beyond stupid I find it hard to believe.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under direction from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had contractors install three large generators in November to lend support to the Palo Seco power station in Toa Baja and another one in Yabucoa — the island’s primary power plants.
The generators can serve as backup if storms damage the main plants, or if other power systems fail. The two Palo Seco generators in the north help stabilize the grid, and could power water pumps in San Juan. The generator at Yabucoa can act as backup if high-tension power lines that cross the island fail.
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On Tuesday, Puerto Rico Sen. Eduardo Bhatia sent a letter to Gen. Todd Semonite of the Army Corps requesting an extension until Dec. 1 to remove the three mega-generators, once hurricane season is over.
"The Puerto Rican power grid is too fragile," Bhatia said at a press conference in Spanish. “These next three months of vulnerability, of hurricanes, of winds, of what looks a lot like a very active hurricane season that already started with Beryl, we have to take Here these into account before we decide to remove the generators.”
Here are some of Bhatia’s tweets:
On top of all of this — to make a bad situation worse — the board of PREPA, the power authority has resigned.
I will post a story about this within the next few days.
What can you do?
First — you can share these stories to you social networks.
Second — pick up the phones and call your elected Reps in Washington — and demand that they stop FEMA from pulling the generators and that they hold hearings on the FEMA failures.
Ultimately, unless we put Democrats in charge in DC — nothing will be done, and we will see yet another death toll from the next storms to hit the island.