5/7/2023 0 Comments Hurricane maria![]() He, Velázquez, and others are pushing a bill to shut down the management board ahead of schedule. Torres said the board is micromanaging the territory’s finances “to the point of humiliating Puerto Rico and stripping it of even the barest form of self-governance.” Critics say the board has enforced overly strict austerity measures on citizens in order to keep payments flowing to the island’s debt holders. The local government must have its budgets approved by the board. In 2016, the federal government appointed a Financial Oversight Management Board to guide the island out of bankruptcy. Puerto Rico’s capacity issues are impacted by the financial restrictions placed on the island as part of its bankruptcy proceedings. But members of Congress are growing increasingly frustrated and even some Democrats want to see the Biden administration take a more involved role. FEMA and local authorities say they have worked many of the kinks out of the system and will finally be ramping up construction on permanent fixes. Now, as the island is digging out from another major storm, Biden is again promising funds to repair the damage. Currie questioned whether the recovery would have just been better off just using FEMA’s normal procedures. “The biggest lesson learned for me with this is, first of all, maybe not rolling out a brand-new program, that even FEMA itself and the federal government hasn’t tested, in a disaster like this,” Chris Currie, director of Homeland Security and Justice at the Government Accountability Office, told a House transportation subcommittee earlier this month. The grants required up-front agreements on cost projections, causing a major paperwork challenge for local officials trying to game out complex, multiyear projects at a time of high inflation. But in practice, that plan appears to have backfired FEMA and local officials were burdened with figuring out a funding model that had never been used at this scale, government auditors would later determine. In theory, this would provide much-needed cash to a local government that could not afford repairs on its own. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) Mario Tama/Getty ImagesįEMA officials tried to get ahead of these problems early on by setting up a special system for funding Puerto Rico’s recovery, utilizing a program that allowed them to disperse funds up front, rather than reimburse expenses later. Residents in her section of the town were without grid power or running water. Resident Mirian Medina stands on her property about two weeks after Hurricane Maria swept through the island on Octoin San Isidro, Puerto Rico. For me this is so personal,” New York representative Nydia Velázquez said. The picture emerging is of a vacuum of power and responsibility that has every authority pointing their finger elsewhere. And perhaps most discouraging was that Fiona had only made an already bad situation much worse Puerto Rico’s power grid was unreliable even before the storm arrived and recovery from Maria continues to be badly behind schedule.Įxasperated congressional leaders are now trying to find out what went wrong and why so many billions of dollars in aid are languishing. All the while people are trying to recover from flooding, washed-out roads, landslides, fallen trees, and exposure to sweltering heat. Hundreds of thousands were without running water for the majority of last week. By Sunday, one week after Fiona made landfall, about half of the island’s roughly 1.5 million power customers remained without electricity, according to the local government. Despite tens of billions of dollars in disaster aid allocated and a half-decade to make fixes, the island’s electricity grid seemed no better prepared. On September 18, Hurricane Fiona made landfall on Puerto Rico almost five years to the day after Hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 people and caused the longest blackout in US history.
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