Trump Already Botched One Hurricane Recovery -- What Will Happen Next?

Late last month, Puerto Rican officials raised the death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to nearly 3,000. The storm which struck last summer, ravaged the island’s electrical grid and left thousands homeless and without water and other supplies. The Trump administration’s response was sharply criticized, and now, as Hurricane Florence bears down on the East Coast, the president is touting the job he did. Speaking from the White House on Tuesday, the Trump called the response “incredibly successful,” an “unsung success” and “one of the best jobs that’s ever been done with respect to what this is all about.” On Wednesday morning, he tweeted that the job they did was “unprecedented,” while sliding in an attack on San Juan’s “incompetent” mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, who has been critical of Trump.

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Cruz had called out Trump hours earlier.

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Yes, Puerto Rico is an island and yes, its electrical grid was precarious before the storm hit, but it’s hard to argue the administration’s response was not a failure. It certainly didn’t receive any “A Pluses.” In October 2017, the United Nations issued a statement criticizing the “alarming” conditions on the island, noting that thousands were still homeless and lacking basic supplies five weeks after the storm hit. “We can’t fail to note the dissimilar urgency and priority given to the emergency response in Puerto Rico, compared to the U.S. states affected by hurricanes in recent months,” wrote Leilani Farha, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to housing. The disparity in relief provided to Puerto Rico versus Texas and Florida is astonishing. According to FEMA, 1.6 million meals were provided 9 days after the storm, compared to a combined 16 million to Texas and Florida after Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma, respectively. In the same time frame, Puerto Rico received 2.8 million liters of water compared to a combined 11.5 to Texas and Florida, and, despite the number of houses destroyed, only 5,000 tarps compared to a combined 118,000 for the two mainland states.

In July, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released an internal report acknowledging a lack of preparedness. The report detailed how the agency was understaffed, how warehouses that were supposed to contain supplies like cots and tarps were nearly empty and how their response plan “did not address insufficiently maintained infrastructure (e.g., the electrical grid).” Communication was also a major issue. The agency was unable to provide the number of satellite phones necessary, and struggled mightily in tracking the flow of supplies. For example:

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trumps-hurricane-response-722914/