Nearly half a million citizens still live without power after Puerto Rico was hammered by Hurricane Maria last September — the island’s worst natural disaster on record.
A Puerto Rican government website says that 83.6% of houses have electricity, although residents and businessmen on the ground insist the percentage still going without electricity is much greater..
“Government’s statistics don’t show the reality and number of places that don’t access to energy,” said Kathy Jara Miranda, a 22-year-old waitress living with her two-year-old baby in Ciales, located in the Central Mountain Range. Ciales is among the hundreds of towns that were badly damaged by the hurricane, and residents are desperate for power to be restored after months of struggle.
“We have to buy refrigerated food daily because we cannot use our fridge. Right now most people have [electrical current] inverters but it’s very expensive,” she said. Ciales and her family plan to move next month to a different town where they can access electricity.
While Miranda and hundreds of thousands of other Puerto Ricans are hunkering down until power is restored and their lives return to a more normal pace, many Puerto Ricans have fled to the continental United States and settled in Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas, among other states.
The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York estimates Puerto Rico may lose up to 470,335 residents or 14% of the population from 2017 to 2019. It has been estimated that more than 5,000 businesses will not operate again due to the destruction of infrastructure. According to Moody’s analytics, the hurricane could cost up to $95 billion, while the island had been struggling financially long before the disaster.
“In the new place we will pay $450 [a month] with water and energy which means our expense will be doubled,” Miranda said. “Puerto Rico has been [recovering] thanks to private entities that have come together and given aid in different parts.”
She said she and friends have volunteered to provide free meals to disaster victims every Sunday. While federal and local officials insist they are making substantial headway in restoring services, schools and other activities, Miranda suggest that much of the progress is due to volunteer efforts.
Despite sustaining the longest air mission of food and water and the largest disaster medical response ever in its history, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been accused by many of being slow in providing aid. Roughly 450,000 people are still without power, even five months after the hurricane.
“We provided over 59 million meals and over 65 million liters of water so far. We also distributed twice as many generators as we did in the Hurricane Catrina,” said Daniel Llargues, a spokesman for FEMA based in Puerto Rico. The agency installed 874 electrical generators on the island and received more than 1.1 million registrations for individual assistance.
New York Rep. Nydia Velazquez, a Democrat who grew up in Puerto Rico, is highly critical of FEMA’s response.
“We saw this clearly through a series of botched FEMA contracts with firms ill-equipped to carry out the task at hand,” she said in an emailed statement.
Most recently, FEMA awarded and then voided a contract for emergency food delivery to a one-person firm with a history of botched contracts, a major snafu that delayed delivery of millions of meals. “FEMA must be held to a higher standard of accountability,” Velazquez said. “Lives are at stake.”
The New York Times reported this week that the contractor, Tiffany Brown, had been awarded the $156 million contract by FEMA to deliver 18.5 million meals to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico as part of a larger shipment but had missed her deadline and delivered only 50,000. The contract was reportedly terminated by FEMA on Oct. 19.
While repeatedly voicing concern about other states hit by hurricanes and storms, Trump has spent little time raising concerns about Puerto Rican storm victims. Trump visited Puerto Rico two weeks after Hurricane Maria, while he visited Texas and Florida four days after Hurricane Harvey and Irma struck those states.
Trump clashed with the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, who had criticized the government’s initial response, and he told residents to be “very proud” they hadn’t experience a “real catastrophe” like Hurricane Katrina. The official death toll in Puerto Rico from the hurricane is 64, although skeptics says it was much larger.
Trump made only passing reference to Puerto Rico in his first State of the Union speech last week. “To everyone still recovering in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, California, and everywhere else — we are with you, we love you, and we will pull through together,” Trump said.
Velazquez says the federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria was deeply inadequate since the beginning.
“The Governor of Puerto Rico has said it will take $94 billion to rebuild the Island,” she said. “To put that into context, the disaster recovery bill passed in the House in December allocated $81 billion to be split between Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Florida, Texas and areas impacted by wildfires.”
The bipartisan two-year budget deal enacted by Congress early Friday morning includes $4.9 billion for Medicaid program to help survivors in Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. An additional $2 billion will be provided to repair energy grids in those territories.