Fema Screws Up Again in Puerto Rico
A FEMA Fault Drove Fears That Food and H2o Help to Puerto Rico Was Ending. It'southward Not.
The prospect of food and water assist coming to an finish for Hurricane Maria survivors in Puerto Rico blindsided the island'south regime this week, prompting angry reactions from local leaders and alarming lawmakers in Washington, who urged the Federal Emergency Management Bureau to opposite form.
By Wednesday, FEMA had done so — except it said it had never intended to end helping Puerto Rico in the first place.
The bureau will go on providing help to the storm-ravaged island for equally long equally it is needed, said William Booher, an agency spokesman. The uproar began when agency officials mistakenly told NPR in an interview published on Monday that FEMA planned to cut off nutrient and h2o aid on Jan. 31.
"This assist is not stopping," Mr. Booher said in an interview on Wednesday. "There was no, and is no, current plan to stop providing these commodities, as long as there continues to be an identified need for them."
According to Mr. Booher, Wednesday was not an actual cutoff point, but rather an internal planning date to evaluate if Puerto Rico could however justify needing assistance.
The confusion marks the latest blot in the federal government'southward response to Maria, which was widely criticized every bit besides minor and too dull. More 4 months after the tempest, nearly a third of Puerto Rican power utility customers are still without electricity, and the island's financial position remains shaky.
"Yesterday, I had to take to a school in Morovis, near an hour outside of San Juan, water and powdered milk to a schoolhouse that doesn't have water or power or enough food for its children," Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan told reporters in Washington on Tuesday.
President Trump offered a brief moment of recognition for natural disaster victims in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, telling them, "We are with y'all, we dearest you, and we always will pull through together. Always."
Mr. Booher insisted on Wednesday that FEMA was non backtracking on its food and water aid plans in response to public criticism. Had the agency planned to end the assist, it would accept required giving find to the Puerto Rican authorities, Mr. Booher noted, and FEMA had no plans to end the assistance without consulting with Puerto Rico. A statement on Tuesday from Héctor M. Pesquera, the island'southward public safety secretary, said that the authorities had non been informed about any cutoff before the NPR report.
Catastrophe the emergency assistance would require a transition of at least two weeks between the federal and Puerto Rican governments, Mr. Pesquera added. FEMA has been distributing h2o bottles, snack food boxes and fix-to-eat meals to Puerto Rican municipalities, where local mayors take handed them out to needy residents.
On Wednesday, Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló told reporters in San Juan that his administration had reached out to the homeland security secretarial assistant, Kirstjen Nielsen, whose department oversees FEMA, to ensure the aid would go along. FEMA's plans, Mr. Rosselló said, had been "perhaps miscommunicated."
Puerto Rico intends to rely on mayors to permit his administration know when their residents no longer need emergency food and water, Mr. Rosselló said.
"You tin can't pretend to end it overnight," he said.
The local FEMA workers cited by NPR on Monday — Alejandro De La Campa, the director of the agency's San Juan-based Caribbean division, and Delyris Aquino-Santiago, a spokesman — mistakenly thought that the date being used in a planning exercise for what ending aid would look like was real, Mr. Booher said.
The reported cutoff date had baffled Washington lawmakers. While major cities like San Juan have had much of their ability restored — allowing people to refrigerate their nutrient — some towns in the island's mountainous interior are all the same in the dark.
"Cutting this assist to the people of Puerto Rico, almost a third of them who still practise not take electricity — it's unconscionable, and it'south a travesty," Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said on the Senate flooring on Tuesday. Thirty lawmakers from both parties had signed a letter imploring FEMA to alter course.
In clarifying FEMA's position, Mr. Booher noted that the bureau's aid has become less necessary as supermarkets and restaurants return to regular business. The agency has full stockpiles of nutrient and h2o to distribute to towns and does not need to bring new supplies to the island for now, he said. FEMA has provided more than $1.six billion in nutrient and more than $361 1000000 in water, in addition to more than 100,000 liters of water, he said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/us/puerto-rico-fema-aid.html
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