I'm not currently in touch with anyone in PR, but as I've noted, I interact with a friend in the USVI fairly often. By text -- so there must be a working tower nearby. She has a cistern under the house, and cooks oatmeal on her gas grill every day for kiddo, 74 year old mother, and 78 year old neighbor.
Apparently the people in public housing are faring quite poorly.
Crashed into the side of an oil tanker?
Probably somebody is very carefully explaining to Trump that PR is part of the United States.
Why isn't this a more major story? What kind of scale are we talking about here? How does this compare to Katrina?
1. I think you know the answer to this one.
2/3: From what I've read and heard, fewer deaths so far, but potential for many more in the months ahead, and tremendous human suffering short of death. Puerto Rico was already in dire financial straits before the hurricane, which is part of why its power infrastructure suffered so badly. It's hard to see how they bounce back from this one, even beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis.
So will the emptying out of PR will resemble New Orleans? Especially since people were already leaving the island in droves (400,000 have left since 2004)? NO lost 250,000 people after Katrina, or about 56% of the total population. By 2008 many had come back, but the total loss in population was still 120,000 or a little over 25%. So another 1 million Puerto Ricans move to the mainland?
One of our Spanish teachers is from PR, and her entire family lives there. She hasn't yet been able to reach them, and is pretty distraught.
6- When they vote in states that count in the electoral college, we can be certain that Trump will say they don't count in the popular vote totals.
I suspect the eventual accounting will find optics-above-all helped killed Puerto Rico. Besides the obvious racism / PR's effectively colonial status, Trump's people were clearly really geared up to say "no Katrina on our watch", which meant making sure he gave the impression to the media of caring about and helping for Harvey. He did that, got a bump in the polls, and now he's got that trophy on his wall they don't feel any need to do anything. They probably would have done more if PR were the first place to be hit.
9: It's incredulous that he got any sort of boost for the nothing he did for Harvey. Dude doesn't even know how to load a truck.
> Why isn't this a more major story?
1. I think you know the answer to this one.
I'm not sure it's so simple. Reasons I can think of:
1. Racism. (I assume this is the one you had in mind.)
2. Objective conditions (remoteness, electricity, etc.) preventing good real-time reporting.
3. Lack of political representation.
(3) seems like a big deal to me and maybe this situation could spur some change. After Harvey, you had Texas Congressional reps lining up to say (in many cases hypocritically) that disaster relief needed to be a major priority. PR has 0 votes in Congress. I don't know if their nonvoting rep (Jenniffer González?) is even in DC right now to try to make a stink.
This whole situation is really exactly what you should expect given the political structures involved. You expect the Congressional majority that's currently focused on trying to take health care away from millions of people to switch over to helping out a territory with no votes, and presumably very little donor interest, out of the goodness of their hearts?
I don't see how having one hurricane that's not Katrina gets you off the hook for subsequent hurricanes that are. I also really, really don't understand why the PR professionals in the WH can't get Trump to say, like, one appropriate thing about Maria for every 3 shitposts about black pro athletes.
11: I was kind of wrapping 11.1 and 11.3 together as "Puerto Rico is full of brown people who (people who set the agenda think) aren't really Americans".
This whole situation is really exactly what you should expect given the political structures involved.
Very much so.
I don't see how having one hurricane that's not Katrina gets you off the hook for subsequent hurricanes that are.
It's like the "trophy for the ability to be a responsible adult" in Hyperbole and a Half, except that the media actually gives it.
11: I joked to Barry earlier, but seriously, this et seq are worth reading.
Also, thanks to people pointing out DuckDuckGo for TFA. Far superior.
Just heard from St Thomas. My friend expects to have her office partially functional by next week. That's really good news.
We should be Berlin Airlifting this shit.
I know a nurse in her late 50's or 60's who can't reach her elderly father.
So, I'm confused about phone coverage.
19. My guess is that some PR cell towers have power via backup generators. This is not uncommon in less-developed countries such as Haiti. Not sure how far you can get with that, though.
Landlines are operating in some parts of PR, per people I know who have family there.
I know at least one of the undersea cables connecting Puerto Rico to the internet was damaged. I expect what WiFi exists is going via satellite, which is expensive, slow, and has limited bandwidth.
Usually cellular is the most resilient network that bounces back fastest after a disaster. In this case, the last numbers I heard was that only 25% of the network was working.... Probably a large proportion of those that have been knocked out are offline as a result of loss of commercial power + lack of backup generators + lack of backup generator fuel. I have heard reports that a number of towers have been knocked over, which doesn't surprise me. A lot of backhaul fiber optic connections that connect towers to the network are probably also down, and in cases where they use microwave transmission for backhaul, the microwave dishes can get blown out of alignment.
I'm in the Bahamas right now going to meetings about damage from Hurricane Irma. This country fared pretty well, with the exception of one or two very small islands in the far south, and a couple tornadoes that touched down elsewhere. When you bring up Puerto Rico in these meetings, everyone just shakes their head.
I saw some perfectly good C-130s belonging to the North Carolina Air National Guard over by the side of the Charlotte airport runway yesterday, conspicuously not being loaded up with relief supplies for Puerto Rico (or, indeed, USVI, BVI, Turks and Caicos, Dominica, Anguilla, Saint Martin/Sint Maartin, Barbuda, or, god help them, Cuba.)
The lack of response to the situation in PR is just mind-boggling.
History wants to get a few more good ones in, just in case anyone ever doubts that the American century ended this year.
22: Do you expect they'll send you to PR to assess damage at some point?
Does that mean we have to give the Virgin Islands back to Denmark?
It means you have to give California back to Mexico. I don't think the Danes will want the Virgins, tbh.
We've discussed the idea of giving South Carolina (back) to Barbados. Now might be a good time.
Speaking of, how's your Russian coming along?
But I'm actually in New Mexico right now, so maybe I should focus on Spanish.
That definitely gives you more options. NM, CA, TX, FL, AZ.
The Coast Guard has thirteen cutters in PR & USVI. It reopened the Port of San Juan so ships were able to start delivering cargo. The Air Force has inserted tactical teams to clear VI airfields and do field expedient ATC. The AF is also flying numerous missions to the reopened fields in PR & USVI. The Navy has two amphibious groups in the area using their supplies, landing craft, helicopters, and sailors and marines. (Aircraft carriers aren't very good for this mission. Amphibious units are.) The Army has Engineer units (some there from after Irma), medical units, and National Guard components from CONUS. More is needed and will be needed. But the armed forces have deployed there. Here is a link to DoD's image repository. It's basically raw footage, but informative for its variety.
I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear to undertake it, or that they shrink from it because of the expense and trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about "liberty" and the "consent of the governed," in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States.
35: Good for them, but it's also worrying in that it feeds the perception that the armed forces are the only functional national-level organization. That's been around for a while, but Trump plus his cabinet picks can only deepen the problem.
28 We've had California for more than 100 years. /standpipin' it
The American Century isn't a literal calendar century, it's a heuristic historiographical century.
That's what I always thought too,but now we see, as it comes to a close, that it really was just the 100 years.
37 seems to be a bit nit-picky. Yes, the armed services are taking the lead in responding to hurricanes in the Caribbean. If not them, who? Is there another bit of the US government with large numbers of ships, landing craft, helicopters, tracked vehicles, bulldozers, field hospitals, bridging units, portable generators, robust communications, deployable ATC teams etc. that should be doing it instead?
It is nitpicky, but the answer to most parts of your question could easily be FEMA. The country has plenty of disasters and DOD has other things to be ready for.
Do you expect they'll send you to PR to assess damage at some point?
No, as its a US territory, supposedly their needs would be taken care of by FEMA. My tentative list right now includes Sint Maartin, Anguilla, and Dominica.
I'm curious to hear about Sint Maarten, a good friend here used to live there and was thinking of retiring there.
The DOD is handling the disasters the Trump administration makes without the help of nature.
42. Isn't FEMA primarily about coordinating disaster response and having plans in place, rather than owning the actual hardware involved? Since the US has a Navy and an Air Force it would seem redundant (not to mention expensive) for FEMA to have them too. Disaster response has long been a recognized area for the military to work in.
Sean Donelan is regularly updating NANOG with telecoms-related reports: https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2017-September/092460.html
(note the detail that T-Mobile's recovery crew got roped in to fix the airport power supply)
Earlier posts say they have 6 subsea cables onto the island, 2 were lost.
46: Like I say, I'm nitpicking. It's not DOD involvement per se, but rather DOD involvement accompanied by a vacuum of civilian leadership. Not just for this in particular, but a persistent perception of military competence accompanied by persistent failures of elected leadership, long predating Trump. Just one more thing rotten in the state of the union.
Well, Trump responded on Twitter. Not sure he realizes PR is actually part of the US. He's doing an amazing job of staying on message, at least if the message is "I hate non white people"
49: How long ago was it that he broke Ann Coulter's heart by agreeing to work with the Dems to preserve DACA?
I picture Trump and a faceless mass of resentful white people singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" at each other.
Except with "turn around blue eyes."
Well, this is kind of terrifying given other dam problems we've had recently. From a FEMA briefing this morning: "Guajataca Dam - Still intact but must be reinforced to ensure stability; water level behind dam needs to go down before a comprehensive assessment of dam can be performed."
51: I just read something somewhere saying that the lyricist meant the song to be about vampires. And I really can't contradict that from reading them.
I read something somewhere the vampires were really all about sex anyway.
Except for Twilight vampires, which are all about Joseph Smith.
53: it seems rude to point out that once the water level has gone down the need for a comprehensive assessment of the dam will be considerably less pressing.
But don't let that stop you. Lives are at stake!
Love at Stake didn't have a vampire that I can recall. Just a witch.
Anyway white people are clearly vampires, so it all hangs together.
On my way to get lunch, there were three Mormons talking to a black man. I assumed they were trying to convert him, but who really knows?
Maybe it was four Mormons talking, arranging a bridge date or something, and one of them was black?
If the black guy was a Mormon, he was the only one not wearing a sign that said he was a Mormon.
He was the undercover brother.
Wow, do Mormons have to wear signs these days? It's clearly worse than I thought.
There has been a reasonably active mission on campus for several months. The kids have been at it long enough to learn to cross the street like a local even though I don't know if Utah even has a crosswalk.
I don't think they wear signs otherwise. Hopefully they don't always wear white oxford shirts all the time either. It's hard to pull off a white dress shirt without a tie.
Are you supposed to wear the tie really loose?
I don't know. I rarely wear a tie or a white dress shirt these days.
It's true, whites show stains so easily.
And they took Clear Gravy off the market.
Given the shirts maybe Mormons aren't vampires? But I guess it would be like them to feed very fastidiously.
I guess I should check to see if there's a dead guy on the street now.
If he's dead, and drained, and there're no spills, you'll know for sure.
It depends on coloring. Olive-skinned men look very chic in white dress shirts without ties. I'm guessing that doesn't cover many Mormons though.
If you are an emergency telecommunications nerd, you may note that the Government of Luxembourg puts together a pretty cool package. Check out that inflatable satellite antenna!
Right now they are deployed to St. Martin and Dominica.