Deconstructing Puerto Rico

NPR reported on Monday that FEMA will “officially shut off” emergency food and water aid to Puerto Rico on January 31, more than four months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island. According to Puerto Rico’s official status site, 97% of the island has water and 92% has access to a supermarket. “The reality is that we just need to look around,” FEMA Caribbean Area Division director Alejandro De La Campa told NPR. “Supermarkets are open, and things are going back to normal.”

  Splinter News

Really? This is not normal:

Over 450,000 Puerto Ricans still lack power, which the Washington Post called the “longest power outage in modern U.S. history” in a recent report on how the outage is affecting hundreds of schools. Officials have said that they don’t expect power to be fully restored across the island until May.

3,000 Puerto Ricans are still living in hotels across the mainland United States. The island’s housing market, already in rough shape, is on the edge of a meltdown, with up to a third of all homeowners facing foreclosures.

[...]

Last month, National Resources Defense Council attorney Mekela Panditharatne wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that took on FEMA’s estimate that 95 percent of the island had access to potable water. “That just isn’t possible,” she wrote. “We put out a report in May showing that in 2015, 99.5 percent of Puerto Ricans — virtually all residents — were served by water sources that violated the Safe Drinking Water Act.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.