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FEMA: Politics, lack of unity hinder hurricane response in Puerto Rico

By Joel Achenbach and Arelis R. Hernández, The Washington Post
Published: October 9, 2017, 8:31pm

The federal response to Hurricane Maria has been hampered by Puerto Rico’s political culture and a lack of unity among leaders on the island, Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator William “Brock” Long said Monday in a briefing with reporters at FEMA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

In the continental U.S., “politics between Republicans and Democrats is bad enough, but in Puerto Rico, politics is even worse in many cases,” Long said, adding that divisions on the island had undermined unity of purpose there.

His comments came at the end of an hourlong session in which he and two U.S. military generals defended the Trump administration’s response to the devastating hurricane. Long singled out the total collapse of communications across Puerto Rico as the greatest impediment to delivering food, water, fuel and other supplies to desperate survivors of the storm, which hit the island Sept. 20.

Reporters also were given a glimpse of the National Response Coordination Center, a war room that’s been operating around the clock since Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in late August.

“You definitely have battle fatigue,” Long said of the protracted tropical storm season in which four hurricanes have made U.S. landfall.

Long’s stated desire has been to be apolitical, he said Monday. But Long is a political appointee of the president — he was overwhelming confirmed by the Senate in June — and the administration’s response to Maria has been subject to abundant criticism.

Most prominently, San Juan’s mayor, Carmen Yul?n Cruz, has expressed outrage at what she sees as a failure of the administration to deliver life-sustaining resources. She posted a series of tweets this weekend accusing FEMA of doing nothing when hospitals were in crisis.

President Donald Trump has attacked Cruz on Twitter, claiming she has shown poor leadership, and he also has blamed Puerto Rico’s poor infrastructure for much of the humanitarian crisis since the storm hit.

Long, speaking Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” said he’d long ago “filtered out” the mayor. On Monday he echoed that comment. A reporter asked him if he viewed criticism of FEMA as justified or as simply a political attack on the administration; that’s when he said the political divide in Puerto Rico is worse than it is in the mainland United States.

“What I’ve experienced firsthand is, a successful response relies on unity, OK,” Long said. “To give you an example, when you can’t get elected officials at the local level to come to a joint field office because they disagree with the politics of the governor that’s there, it makes things difficult and the information fragmented.”

Puerto Rico Gov. Richard Rossell? generally has expressed appreciation for the administration’s efforts.

Reporters on the ground in Puerto Rico have heard repeatedly that there was little sign of the government, or none at all, in the days after the storm hit the island, especially in remote rural and mountainous areas that found themselves isolated. The ongoing recovery effort has been mired in bureaucracy and frustration, residents say. People often find themselves filling out paperwork in English and walking out from encounters with officials with no assurance that anything they have requested will materialize.

Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, attended Monday’s FEMA briefing and offered new metrics on the scale of the disaster. He said officials need to remove debris that could fill 350 Olympic-size swimming pools. An estimated 60,000 homes need some kind of help, he said.

As for the critical issue of electrical power, he said 14 percent of the grid is up and running. The island needs 2,700 megawatts of electricity to operate and at last count had 376 megawatts available. Four hundred 75-foot-tall transmission towers were “wiped out” by the storm, he said. Semonite said a dam in western Puerto Rico continues to erode and will need to be rebuilt.

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