THE BEAUTY OF LIFE

What's Happening With the Relief Effort in Puerto Rico?

What is happening in Puerto Rico?

Since the storm made landfall on September 20, Hurricane Maria has wreaked havoc on the island, causing a level of widespread destruction and disorganization paralleled by few storms in American history. Almost two weeks after the storm abated, most of the island’s residents still lack access to electricity and clean water.

From a meteorological standpoint, Maria was nearly a worst-case scenario for the territory: The center of a huge, nearly Category 5 hurricane made a direct hit on Puerto Rico, lashing the island with wind and rain for longer than 30 hours. “It was as if a 50- to 60-mile-wide tornado raged across Puerto Rico, like a buzz saw,” Jeff Weber, a meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has told Vox.

Maria has many elements of a “catastrophic event,” and not just a disaster, says Tricia Wachtendorf, a professor of sociology at the University of Delaware who studies disaster relief.

Catastrophic events are rarer than disasters, and they tend to wipe out infrastructure over a large swath of land. “Most, if not all, of the built environment is destroyed” in a catastrophe, Wachtendorf told me.

“It’s very difficult to navigate the impact zone—to know which roads are open, and to know what to detour around. It’s extremely difficult to pre-position supplies, because if you have any supplies pre-positioned they might have been destroyed. You have [local] officials that are unable to take their usual roles on,” she said.
This renders Maria a different class of disaster than Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, both of which left much of the nearby infrastructure standing. In both storms, supplies that were positioned inland or in Atlanta were still available after the storms had passed.
But were the bad effects of Hurricane Maria made worse by a slow federal response? Democrats and other critics have implicated President Donald Trump’s dawdling response to the hurricane—he did not hold a Situation Room meeting on the disaster until six days after landfall—in the low quality of the relief effort. The president’s tendency to take criticisms of the effort personally has not seemed to help either.
Are these criticisms fair? And how should we even understand the Puerto Rico disaster? To help get a handle on the storm, I put together a timeline of the major events in Puerto Rico before and after Hurricane Maria made landfall. It follows below, and I’ll keep it updated in the days to come.I’ll say straight-out: There are few obvious gaps in the federal response in the timeline. But it does make it clear that the speed and scale of the initial Maria relief effort pales next to other recent campaigns.

After a magnitude-7 earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, President Obama ordered a massive military and civilian response. As The Washington Post describes: Eight thousand troops were bound for the island within two days; 22,000 troops and 33 ships had arrived within two weeks. And five days after the quake struck, former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton joined Obama at the White House to announce the Haiti Fund, a multimillion-dollar philanthropic appeal for the foreign country.
By comparison, only about 7,200 military personnel have made it to Puerto Rico two weeks after landfall.
And while the five living former presidents added Hurricane Maria to One America Appeal, their preexisting campaign for hurricane-relief donations, five days after landfall, they have not visited the White House or gone on television. President Trump tweeted about One America Appeal once, on the day that Hurricane Irma made landfall, but that was well before Hurricane Maria formed.
This speed did not ensure Haiti had a successful recovery, and today the earthquake-relief effort is considered a failure. But the precedent suggests that the U.S. military might have responded with greater speed than it did to Maria. Unlike Haiti, Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory; unlike an earthquake, a hurricane is predictable. The National Weather Service first warned that Maria could strike the island as a “dangerous major hurricane” more than three weeks ago.

Likewise, the first public call to mobilize the USNS Comfort, the only U.S. Navy hospital ship on the East Coast, came from Hillary Clinton on Sunday, September 24, four days after landfall.

The Comfort was not deployed until Tuesday, September 26, six days after landfall; did not leave port until Thursday, September 28, more than a week after landfall; and did not reach Puerto Rico until Tuesday, October 3, 11 days after Maria hit the island. A Pentagon official has told The Washington Post that the Navy considered sending the Comfort before the storm but decided Puerto Rican ports could not immediately handle a ship that large.