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Aid Is Getting to Puerto Rico. Distributing It Remains a Challenge. Aid Is Getting to Puerto Rico. Distributing It Remains a Challenge.
(about 5 hours later)
LAS MARÍAS, P.R. — Inside a dark school building sheltering families left homeless by landslides and hurricane winds, bottled water was getting so scarce on Monday that relief workers parceled out one small plastic cup to go with each person’s dinner. LAS MARÍAS, P.R. — Inside a dark school sheltering families left homeless by landslides and hurricane winds, bottled water was getting so scarce on Monday that relief workers parceled out one small plastic cup to go with each person’s dinner of hot dogs, rice and beans and syrupy apricots.
“We have to ration a little bit,” a relief worker, Yamary Rivera, told a shirtless 69-year-old man in a wheelchair as he tucked into a foil tray of hot dogs, rice and beans and syrupy canned apricots. “This is the ration,” Thomas Bosque, 60, whose roof was torn off in the storm, said, lifting his cup.
At a local command center, the mayor of this demolished mountain municipality of 9,500 people was also waiting for food and water — nine pallets sent by the federal government that lay at a regional distribution center an hour away. But the only way for the mayor, Edwin Soto Santiago, to get them was to send a truck down muddy, tree-strewn roads. And a day earlier, Las Marías had missed its chance to pick up a fresh shipment, the mayor said, because nobody told them it had arrived. At a local command center, Edwin Soto Santiago, the mayor of this devastated mountain municipality of 9,500 people, was also waiting for food and water — nine pallets sent by the federal government that lay at a regional distribution center an hour away. But the only way for the mayor to get them was to send a truck down muddy, tree-strewn roads. And a day earlier, Las Marías had missed its chance to pick up a fresh shipment, the mayor said, because nobody told them it had arrived.
“We’re still looking for it,” Mr. Santiago said.“We’re still looking for it,” Mr. Santiago said.
Two weeks after Hurricane Maria split apart Puerto Rico, basic aid is now trickling into towns and barrios aching for assistance. But many families are still receiving just meager portions, and delivery is being hampered by bureaucratic choke points that have put ill-equipped and overburdened local mayors in charge of figuring out how to haul supplies from regional drop-off points to their storm-ravaged towns. Two weeks after Hurricane Maria split apart Puerto Rico, basic aid is arriving in San Juan and reaching more remote towns and barrios aching for assistance. But some families say that they are still receiving only meager portions, and that delivery is being hampered by bureaucratic choke points that have left ill-equipped and overburdened local mayors to figure out how to haul supplies from regional drop-off points to their storm-ravaged towns.
Mr. Santiago said that the first aid shipment to Las Marías, where one person died and scores of homes were destroyed, had arrived by military helicopter last Tuesday. The town has since received two shipments from the Red Cross and three from the regional center in Mayagüez, on Puerto Rico’s western coast. But Mr. Santiago said he was still waiting for a satellite phone promised to him by Puerto Rican officials, and said he had been trying unsuccessfully to reach water authorities about when running water might be restored. On Tuesday, as President Trump visited the island for the first time since the storm, Governor Ricardo A. Rosselló acknowledged at a news conference that officials were still working out kinks that have prevented the distribution of relief supplies sent to the island.
“During Georges, we didn’t have to look for anything,” Mr. Santiago said, referring to the hurricane that lashed Puerto Rico and the Caribbean in 1998, two years after he was first elected mayor. “Everything came here. Now, we have to go look for it, go ask for it.” Mr. Rosselló said a major issue was getting transportation to distribute aid to people who need it. He said the government was offering more trucks to the mayors and to the centers where hot food could be prepared and delivered.
Governor Ricardo A. Rosselló acknowledged at a news conference on Tuesday that officials were still working out kinks that have prevented the distribution of relief supplies sent to the island. He announced that the government would provide trucks to the municipalities that needed them. “We have delivered food and water, and it hasn’t gotten to some people,” he said. “They didn’t listen, couldn’t hear, the information didn’t get to them.” He added: “I recognize there are still people that might not have gotten those resources.”
About 95 percent of the island remains without power, the governor said. Cellphone service has been restored to about 40 percent of households, and more than half still don’t have running water. Mr. Rosselló said a major issue remains getting transportation to distribute aid sent to the island to people who need it. The relief operation has come under fire for ground-level failures to provide relief and for its overall approach to the effort. In a number of interviews, Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, who is widely credited with turning around the Bush administration’s sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina has said the Trump administration has underutilized the military, exacerbating the slow delivery of aid and the removal of debris. General Honoré said he would move 50,000 troops to Puerto Rico.
“We have delivered food and water and it hasn’t gotten to some people,” he said. “They didn’t listen, couldn’t hear, the information didn’t get to them.” But some disaster experts say that while the military can be useful, it is not a cure-all in relief efforts, and that too many troops could overwhelm available resources in Puerto Rico. Others note the demands of addressing three major hurricanes in a row. The Trump administration has put an Army general in charge of recovery efforts and several thousand additional troops will soon be sent to the island.
“I recognize there are still people that might not have gotten those resources,” he added. In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, government officials said they were making progress in aid efforts.
The governor’s remarks came as President Trump visited the island amid lingering concerns about the effectiveness of the response to the storm. Alejandro De La Campa, the coordinating officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Puerto Rico, said officials so far have installed 22 generators, primarily at high-priority facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes. The Army Corps of Engineers is deciding where to install 100 additional generators, and another 300 are en route to the island. Officials said about $28 million had been approved for local municipalities for debris removal and other services.
Mr. Rosselló also said the federal government had denied a request to allow hurricane victims in Puerto Rico who use food stamps to redeem them at fast-food restaurants and other places that serve prepared hot meals. Still, Mr. De La Campa said, recovery efforts in the interior of the island continue to lag because many of the roads remain inaccessible.
He said he was pursuing the issue with federal officials and was hoping the waiver would come soon. “We are currently developing a strategy to reach the center of the island,” he said.
With a widespread power failure having knocked out electricity to the island for the past two weeks, food stamp recipients around the island have said that they have been unable to use their benefits at supermarkets, because most stores are running on generators and do not have access to computer systems to process the cards. About 1.3 million Puerto Ricans — nearly 40 percent of the population — use food stamps. Federal rules prohibit public assistance beneficiaries from using the cards in restaurants. FEMA officials said they did not encounter the same issues distributing supplies to residents after the hurricanes in Texas and in Florida because, despite the damage, most roads into those areas remained intact. Once the floodwaters receded they were able to deliver aid.
Many banks are still closed, which has also limited peoples’ ability to buy food with cash. With no cash or food stamps, people are relying on neighbors and whatever canned goods they purchased in the days before the storm hit. “With Maria, you had a number of roads that were completely washed out and bridges that were impacted,” said Will Booher, a spokesman for FEMA. “That’s what’s made it much more challenging.”
“I have the money on my account, but nobody has their systems running,” said Marilyn Cruz, 39, who lives in Comerío with her three children. She went to the supermarket to buy water, because bottled water always runs out at the shelter where she is staying with her three children. Compounding the problems, some cities in Puerto Rico did not have enough trucks to haul their supplies home, if they had any available at all, leaving one city to borrow transportation from another.
“Any water we drank, I had to buy,” she said. “Some of them had to leave maybe a pallet behind, because they couldn’t fit,” said Capt. Amado Zudaire of the Puerto Rico State Guard, the commander of the regional staging area in the northeast city of Cánovanas. “The more we give them, the tougher it gets on them to deliver.”
In interviews, both former and current FEMA officials say the agency’s role in disasters has always been to provide supplies such as food and water and generators to local officials. It is the responsibility of local officials to get those supplies out to communities, the officials said. But large enclosed trucks that belong to the Puerto Rico Department of Education were seen sitting unused at the staging area in Cánovanas on Monday.
But in Puerto Rico large portions of the infrastructure was destroyed and badly damaged; many roads are still impassable nearly two weeks after Hurricane Maria made landfall. Puerto Rican and federal officials said they had been pushing out the approximately five million meals and five million liters of water that had been delivered to the island of 3.4 million people, largely through an expanding network of 11 regional aid centers set up by the governor. But some local officials said they needed assistance commensurate with their populations — more than the three pallets of food and one pallet of water allotted per day.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said that given the damage and lack of resources available to local officials, the military needed to play a larger role. “I received 10,000 meals so far, and we’re a city of 54,000,” Lornna Soto, the mayor of Cánovanas, said on Monday. “We need more water. We need more food.”
Mr. Blumenthal was one of several Democratic lawmakers who met on Monday with FEMA and other government officials. Ms. Soto stood with a megaphone in front of the public library, where an ad hoc distribution point had formed. The Red Cross was handing out fresh fruit, and city workers were giving out boxes of water and food from FEMA.
“We need the military to play a major role, providing trucks, helicopters, and other needs,” he said. “It has to play a major role because the situation is different with Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands; they don’t have the resources. So the military will have to do more than it normally would on the mainland because of the unprecedented devastation on the islands.” “There’s no more water!” Ms. Soto told the people waiting in line.
The Defense Department has sent thousands of troops to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico but the three-star general leading the military’s recovery efforts on the island said more needed to be done. “It’s not enough, and we’re bringing more in,” said Lt. Gen. Jeff Buchanan, shortly after arriving on the island last week. Families walked away with one or two meals, and the lucky ones also got 24 bottles of water. Aida Nieves, 63, received two meals to feed the eight people in her household.
“Well, at least the water arrived — that’s a first,” Ms. Nieves said as she pushed her cart. “That’s for today. I guess tomorrow we have to come back. The people here were waiting, and it was not coming. We were so desperate.”
Other families said it was unfair that there was no clear process for receiving food. The deliveries were left to luck and chance. Those who happened to be standing nearby when the food came received it.
In remote areas such as Las Marías, people said they were still waiting. Rosa Esther Hernández, 71, has been so isolated where she lives alone on a sheer hillside that she wanted to know one simple thing when visitors approached her front door on Monday: “Que hora es?” What time is it?
Like everyone else in the municipality, she has no running water, so she relies on whatever flows down from the mountains through a makeshift network of tubes and tanks. It is usually just a trickle, she said, so she has been taking sponge baths and relying on her son-in-law to bring in bottled water. She said she had heart problems, and her left arm hung limp from a stroke, all of which compounded her concern about the damaged roads and lack of communication.
“I can’t scream because there’s no one here,” she said. “If I have an emergency, I’ll die.”
In the mountains, the scale of natural devastation continues to hamper delivery efforts. In Las Marías, the storm clogged so many roads and toppled so many trees that it took volunteers and work crews about a week of sawing through fallen tree trunks and bulldozing mudslides to clear a path, local officials said. But keeping those supply lines open is a Sisyphean task.
“When it rains for 10, 15 minutes, everything we’ve cleared slides and we have to clear it again,” said Wilver Morales, 43, who works for the municipal government. “And every day, it rains.”
But there is resilience in neighborhoods and among people. Families open their taps to neighbors, share meals and distribute oranges that fall from their trees.
In Cánovanas, the walls and roof of Carmen DeLeon’s house collapsed in the storm, and she now spends her days cleaning up the soggy mess and cooking rice and beans on a gas stove for her 18-year-old daughter and 2-year-old grandson. She said she did not see food deliveries until Monday, when she received a case of FEMA water — her first since the storm.
“It’s been a little slow,” Ms. DeLeon said. “I have food stamps, but none of the stores are taking them. Until they reestablish that service, I just don’t know what we are going to do. It’s a crisis, because we do not have cash either.”
But standing in the moonlight that cascaded into what was left of her living room, Ms. DeLeon said Puerto Ricans were doing their best to get by and were still grateful for the little they had.
“Some people really lost everything,” she said, and indicated a wall that was still standing amid the wreckage. “Thank God half my house was cement. I still have that wall.”