It took an agonizing month to get here, but the world has mostly gotten its story straight on the disaster in Puerto Rico. The White House went from denying that Hurricane Maria had ever happened to mentioning the storm by name and acknowledging the human impact of destroyed power plants. Major news outlets are using terms like “post-apocalyptic” and are showing photos of empty supermarket shelves. The state government of Puerto Rico is doing better at capturing daily information on the disaster recovery and their information is slowly catching up to the magnitude of the disaster.
Looking back, the strangest thing about the Puerto Rico disaster response was the initial six-day delay in which it seemed hardly anything happened. It seemed as though federal agencies, charities, and news organizations crossed their fingers and hoped for good news in spite of the weather reports that indicated a storm likely to damage most of the buildings on the island. These were days wasted when it would have made more sense to start helping local authorities in search and rescue in any way possible.
There was surely an element of procrastination in the White House’s response, as if they hoped the story would just blow over if they did nothing at all. After ten days or so, the initial reaction from the White House felt more like a coverup than a response. Perhaps the White House did not want to highlight the early days in which it did nothing at all while the President went out to play golf. During the coverup period there were social media reports of emergency supplies in Puerto Rico being improperly diverted. This was part of the coverup story. None of the people making these reports had actually seen any emergency supplies. There were only rumors of supplies that had supposedly come and gone in the dead of night, an exceedingly unlikely scenario in a place where all the lights, including the street lights, had gone dark. The more plausible explanation for these reports is that these supplies had been promised but had not yet reached Puerto Rico. It was impossible for the supplies to be diverted because there was nothing there.
The White House has made a series of statements that indicate that it sees the crisis in Puerto Rico primarily as a profit opportunity for Wall Street. Protecting hedge funds and bond investors from losses is a higher priority than preventing deaths from starvation and waterborne pathogens, according to the way the White House describes the situation. This point of view will for years to come serve as the picture of colonialism as advocates for democracy seek to change Puerto Rico’s status.
Workers are in the very early stages of getting Puerto Rico running again, and the most optimistic plans call for electric power for close to 90 percent of customers by the end of the year. It will take longer than that for workplaces to be operating again, and in the meantime, hundreds of thousands of workers will leave Puerto Rico for jobs in the eastern United States and California. One of the big unknowns in Puerto Rico is just how many residents have already moved away. The influx of voters could affect the electoral balance in some states, particularly Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and New York. When the numbers are finally added up I expect Hurricane Maria will stand as both the most disruptive disaster and the most badly muffed disaster response in U.S. history. Voters who remember this debacle a year from now will not look kindly on the Trump White House or its allies in Washington.
