Puerto Rico Hurricane Deaths Undercounted By Thousands

It turns out the rumors of a massive loss of life in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria were true. A new study by Harvard University estimates that the official estimate does not count thousands of people who were killed during and after the storm, which hit the island on September 20 of last year.

The new study is not definitive, but it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the official numbers published by the government of Puerto Rice which puts the death toll at 64. Other organizations previously estimated that as many as 1,000 people died as a result of the storm, but the Harvard study puts the estimate much higher at 4,645.

The Harvard study used statistical analysis to arrive at its conclusion. Researchers visited 3,299 household on the island and asked residents several survey questions.

“Statistically, it's like having interviewed the whole island,” Domingo Marqués, one of the report’s authors told CNN.

The survey included questions about deaths in the household, whether related or not to the storm. The researchers then compared the survey data to 2016 mortality data from the island to arrive at an estimate of how many deaths were related to the storm.

The statistical analysis showed that between 793 to 8,498 people died during the storm or in the unsafe conditions that lingered for months afterward. The number cited in the report, 4,645, is the average between the two extremes. While the range of possible deaths is extremely large, even the low end of the range is more than 17 times larger than the official estimate. The exact death toll will never be known.

“The lack of electricity and basic services meant that people couldn't get the help they needed for a long time after the storm," Christy Delafield, a spokeswoman for relief agency Mercy Corps told USA Today. "The elderly, people with health problems and the very young were at particular risk.”

The government of Puerto Rico is not disputing the higher estimated death toll. In a press release, Carlos R. Mercader, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, said, “The Government of Puerto Rico welcomes the newly released Harvard University survey and we look forward to analyzing it.”

Hector Pesquera, head of Puerto Rico's public safety department, said at a press conference that the island’s government did not have a reason to question the Harvard statistics. A George Washington University study on the death toll commissioned by the government is still forthcoming.

The Harvard report also faulted both the federal government and the territorial governments for an inadequate response to the hurricane. A post-hurricane analysis of the FEMA response plan found that they agency did not anticipate the extent of damage and overestimated the ability of local and territorial agencies to respond.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told USA Today, “We have been supportive of Gov. Rosello's efforts to ensure full accounting and transparency, and those who have suffered from this tragedy deserve nothing less.”

Sanders pointed out that the relief effort was the largest FEMA disaster response in history. At its height, more than 19,000 workers from 80 agencies were on the ground in Puerto Rico.

Bonnie Castillo, executive director of National Nurse United, said the higher estimate matched what volunteer nurses reported on the ground. “Our volunteer RNs came back to the U.S. and said again and again, ‘The people of Puerto Rico are dying. Do something!'” she said.

Castillo said that returning nurses told of people “left to die” and that the government relief effort had “failed its own American citizens.” Whether the failure was the result of incompetence or inability to imagine the devastation that a storm like Hurricane Maria could wreak, for the people of Puerto Rico, the result was the same.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Puerto Rico Relief Is Hard Enough Without Trump's Tweetstorm

Over the past few days, as President Trump has come under fire for his response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of the island of Puerto Rico. Trump’s supporters have taken to Twitter and Facebook to defend the president. Many are claiming that if Texans could help themselves, Puerto Ricans should likewise be able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. After Trump’s tweets this morning attacking the mayor of San Juan, the level of acrimony will almost certainly increase.

Trump’s defenders do raise a legitimate question: Why can’t the inhabitants of Puerto Rico help themselves rebuild their island and repair the damage from Hurricane Maria? The answer is that the situation in Puerto Rico is very different from the situation in Texas.

As the president so eloquently pointed out on Friday, Puerto Rico “is an island, surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water.” As most students of American geography will recall, Texas is not an island, which made it much easier to bring relief workers and supplies into the affected areas. Because Puerto Rico is an island, almost everything, from food to fuel, must be shipped in.

Adding to the difficulty, the island’s ports, airports and roads were also heavily damaged by the storm. The waiver of the Jones Act will allow more shipping capacity to be directed to Puerto Rico, but the ability of ports to offload the cargo is still a limiting factor.

The problems don’t end as relief supplies are offloaded on the island. There are reports that mountains of supplies are sitting in San Juan, but cannot be delivered due to damaged roads and shortages of trucks, diesel fuel and drivers. KTLA Channel Five in Los Angeles reported that one Puerto Rico trucking company has 3,000 crates of supplies, but has only been able to dispatch four percent of them due the shortages of drivers and trucks.

Another difficulty that Puerto Rico faces that Texas did not is the widespread power outage. Maria destroyed 80 percent of the island’s power lines per reports by CNBC. It will take months to restore power to the island.

Meanwhile, the lack of electricity makes almost everything more difficult. Where generators and fuel are not available, even the simplest tasks must be performed by hand. The lack of lights also means that time available to work is shorter. Communication is difficult both because of the lack of electricity and the fact that the storm damaged or destroyed cell phone towers.

In contrast, after Hurricane Harvey, relief supplies could be trucked directly to Texas from other parts of the country. Roads were damaged, but there were alternate routes available in most cases. Damage from the hurricane force winds was localized in Texas, rather than spread across the whole coast. Ports and airports reopened quickly.

Most the damage in Houston and Beaumont came from torrential rains and flooding. As a result, electricity stayed on in these heavily populated urban areas. This made it easier for both residents of the area and relief workers.

Finally, I have to point out that Texans did not recover our own. We received a lot of help from around the country. When a large part of Houston was underwater, the Cajun Navy arrived on the scene with boats to pluck stranded Texans from their homes and ferry them to safety. Once the flood waters receded, the infrastructure in Houston was largely intact, unlike the infrastructure of Puerto Rico.

It isn’t fair to blame President Trump for the difficulties with a relief effort that makes the Berlin airlift look easy by comparison. For months to come, the island’s population of more than three million people will be almost entirely dependent upon outside assistance. It is unreasonable to assume that the entire effort could be established and bring the island back to normal within a few weeks.

It is also unreasonable for President Trump to lash out at the island’s representatives who are understandably under an enormous amount of stress. President Trump should have overcome his instinctive tendency to immediately counterpunch at any hint of a slight and instead offered calm reassurance that the federal government is doing everything it can to save the lives of the storm victims.

So far, there is no evidence that the federal response to Hurricane Maria has been bungled. There is also no evidence that Puerto Ricans are not doing everything within their very limited ability to make their situation better.

Attacking the mayor of San Juan as a poor leader is a bad idea on several levels. First, it undermines her authority. Second, it sets up an adversarial relationship between federal and local governments at a time when cooperation is badly needed to save lives. That conflict will only be picked up and exacerbated by both supporters and opponents of the president. Finally, it makes President Trump look incredibly small and vain.

One characteristic of a leader is the ability to overlook perceived personal slights and focus on the job at hand. It remains to be seen whether President Trump has what it takes to be a unifying leader, but he has not exhibited those qualities today. Maria is not Katrina, but the president’s mishandling of the situation may well turn the relief effort into a leadership scandal.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Why the Feds Denied Puerto Rico a Shipping Waiver – And Why Congress Should Act

After Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the federal government loosened restrictions on a century-old shipping law to allow foreign ships to carry relief supplies and fuel from US ports to affected areas in Florida, Louisiana and Texas. This week the Trump Administration denied a request for a similar waiver to allow foreign ships to ferry supplies from the mainland United States to the island of Puerto Rico.

The Jones Act, formally known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, regulates maritime trade between US ports and in US territorial waters. Part of the law restricts cabotage, trade between two ports within the United States, to American vessels. Foreign vessels can transport cargo from other countries into the US, but not from one US port to another. Since Puerto Rico is American territory, trade between the mainland of the United States and the island is limited to American ships. The Jones Act was passed after World War I to help revitalize the American merchant marine losses incurred during the war.

After hurricanes hit Texas and Florida, the Trump Administration waived the Jones Act to allow more ships to move cargo from American ports to the affected areas. The extra shipping capacity helped to alleviate a looming fuel shortage after the storms.

Reuters reports that a delegation of congressmen led by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) petitioned the Department of Homeland Security to issue a similar waiver to aid Puerto Rico. This time the request was denied.

Gregory Moore, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, explained that an assessment of US shipping had determined that there was “sufficient capacity” on American ships to bring in supplies to Puerto Rico. “The limitation is going to be port capacity to offload and transit, not vessel availability,” Moore explained. With Puerto Rico’s ports and airports heavily damaged by the storm, the limiting factor on aid to Puerto Rico is not ships to transport the cargo, but ports in which to offload it.

 “We do have the capability,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford told Senators on Military.com, but relief ships and airplanes “can't come in until we get the ports and airfields open.”

The Jones Act has been controversial for years and its effect on hurricane relief means that it will remain a sore spot for the island. The New York Times explains that there are two options for bringing foreign goods to Puerto Rico. If the ships come directly to the island, they must pay heavy taxes, tariffs and fees. The other option is to ship the goods to the mainland United States and then put them on American ships for the journey to Puerto Rico. In either case, the increased costs are passed along to consumers.

The Times notes that the added cost makes prices “at least double” that of neighboring islands, including the US Virgin Islands which are not covered by the Jones Act. The cost to the Puerto Rico economy is estimated to be billions of dollars annually.

A temporary waiver of the Jones Act, would likely lift morale on the shattered island, if nothing else. “Our dependence on fossil fuel imports by sea is hampering the restoration of services,” Juan Declet-Barreto, an energy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Reuters. The decision not to allow a waiver “is raising fears on the island that they are going to be left behind in this disaster.”

As ports are repaired, goods imported to the island by foreign ships will be more able to aid the long-term recovery and rebuilding of the island. Prices for food and consumer goods would drop which would increase the standard of living as well as making manufacturing and tourism more attractive.

Shipping companies oppose changing the law, which they say is necessary to keep the American merchant shipping industry strong and protect jobs, but the policy is already applied unevenly. The Jones Act applies to Alaska and Hawaii as well as Puerto Rico, but at least three US territories, including the US Virgin Islands, are exempt from the law.

While a Jones Act waiver may not help the island in the short term, repeal of the cabotage section of the Jones Act may help the island’s recovery in the long term. The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute are among the organizations that have advocated repeal. In recent years, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) have proposed repeal of the law. As the island struggles to rebuild after Hurricane Maria, the time to end the Jones Act may have finally come.  

Originally published on The Resurgent

After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico Needs Your Help To Survive

Often a story of little consequence can grab the imagination and attention of the nation while a much bigger story passes by without notice. That’s the case right now as the NFL protests block out almost everything else including the admission by the Trump Administration that 21 states were targeted by hackers during last year’s election, the president’s new expanded travel ban and, most sadly, the devastating effect that Hurricane Maria had on the islands of the Caribbean, particularly Puerto Rico.

Maybe it’s hurricane fatigue. Maybe it’s the fact that most of us don’t really think of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands as a part of the United States. Maybe it’s just that the NFL is right in our living rooms while the people of Puerto Rico are a thousand miles away in the middle of the Caribbean.

Part of the problem may be the difficulty in reporting news from an island where the power grid has been knocked completely offline and may not be operational for six months. Think about that. An island of 3.6 million people, a territory of the United States, has been effectively moved back 100 years in time.

No electrical power in a tropical climate means no air conditioning and no refrigeration for food. Medical care is difficult without lights and power for medical equipment. The category four storm killed 30 people in the Caribbean, but many more may die in the aftermath of the storm from lack of food, water and medical care.

Without electric power, the island’s manufacturing and tourism sectors of the economy will also crash to a standstill. With factories idle and resorts closed, most of the island’s inhabitants will have no way to support themselves and their families.

The bottom line is that Puerto Rico and the other islands damaged by Hurricane Maria are going to need lots of help for a long time. With FEMA funds almost exhausted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the burden is going to fall on private charities funded by donations from companies and individuals like you and me.

If you are uncertain about what to donate or what charities are worthy of your donation, the FEMA website publishes guidelines for donations and the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) has an online form that helps to steer your donation to vetted organizations. NBC’s Chuck Todd has also identified several organizations that are top rated for their work in Puerto Rico.  

FEMA recommends that you donate cash rather than supplies. My experience volunteering at a shelter in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey confirms that money is easier to deal with than supplies. Cash can purchase exactly what is needed at the time while donations of supplies may or may not contain what is needed at the time. (I think back to an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati in which the station donated 3,000 blonde wigs to Guatemalan earthquake victims.) Supplies must be inventoried, sorted, stockpiled and shipped. That takes manpower, time and money.

Donations of supplies that aren’t needed right away incur costs for storage and take up space. Since the affected areas are islands, virtually everything needed to sustain the people who live there for the next six months will have to be brought in on ships or airplanes. It is much more efficient to purchase large quantities of relief supplies that are ready for shipment than to bundle donations together in a piecemeal fashion.

NVOAD also has a contact form for volunteers who would like to go to one of the areas affected by the hurricanes to help personally. With FEMA and other relief organizations stretched thin by three disasters in quick succession, additional volunteers will be badly needed.

Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands will be dependent on outside aid for survival for a very long time. The chain of disasters is taxing the reserves of relief agencies as well as wearing out relief workers. The citizens of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands need your help.

It’s time to come together to help our fellow Americans on the US islands of the Caribbean. 

Originally published on The Resurgent