By Michelle Fox 29 September 2017 (CNBC) – When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, it took down 80 percent of the transmission and distribution power lines, Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority CEO Ricardo Ramos told CNBC on Friday.Power went down across the entire island after the hurricane made landfall as a Category 4 storm […]
By Juliette Kayyem 30 September 2017 (CNN) – It is a difficult task to turn the memory of Hurricane Katrina into a quaint story of well-meaning government actors unable to save a city from destruction.President Donald Trump managed to do that on Saturday morning when he essentially blamed Puerto Rico and its mayor, in a […]
By Brandon Carter 30 September 2017 (The Hill) – Retired Lt. General Russel Honoré, who oversaw the U.S. military response to Hurricane Katrina, fired back at President Trump over his early morning tweets attacking Puerto Rican leaders. “The mayor’s living on a cot, and I hope the president has a good day at golf,” Honoré […]
By Matt Ruby and Rumsey Taylor 30 September 2017 (The New York Times) – 6 a.m. Near Corozal: The sun rose Wednesday morning in the low mountains of north-central Puerto Rico, near the town of Corozal, to reveal the world that Hurricane Maria has made: shattered trees, traffic lights dangling precipitously from broken poles, and, […]
By Matthew Nussbaum And Marc Caputo 30 September 2017 (Politico) – President Donald Trump attacked the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Saturday, writing on Twitter that she and other leaders on the storm-ravaged territory “want everything to be done for them.” Trump’s early morning broadsides came after San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz […]
By Abby Hamblin 29 September 2017 (San Diego Tribune) – Puerto Rico Mayor Yulín Cruz is begging for help with Hurricane Maria relief for the island of more than 3.4 million people suffering without power and other basic necessities. “I am begging, begging anyone that can hear us to save us from dying,” she said […]
By Frances Robles and Luis Ferré-Sadurní 24 September 2017 YABUCOA, P.R. (The New York Times) – José A. Rivera, a farmer on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, stood in the middle of his flattened plantain farm on Sunday and tried to tally how much Hurricane Maria had cost him.“How do you calculate everything?” Mr. […]
By Samantha Schmidt and Joel Achenbach 24 September 2017 JUNCOS, Puerto Rico (The Washington Post) – In the heat and humidity here in the central mountains, Meryanne Aldea fanned her bedridden mother with a piece of cardboard Sunday as the ailing woman lay on her side, relieving a large ulcer in her back. The 63-year-old […]
By Danica Coto 24 September 2017 SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (Associated Press) – Puerto Rico’s nonvoting representative in the U.S. Congress said Sunday that Hurricane Maria’s destruction has set the island back decades, even as authorities worked to assess the extent of the damage. “The devastation in Puerto Rico has set us back nearly 20 […]
23 September 2017 (United Nations) – Pleading with all countries in the United Nations General Assembly – large and small, rich and poor – to come together to save our planet, the Prime Minister of Dominica, where the landscape, ravaged by back-to-back hurricanes “resembles a warzone,” said his and other islands in the Caribbean need […]
