Biden, Trump, & The Puerto Rico Hurricanes

Did anyone notice the coverage of the recent Puerto Rico hurricane? Years ago, under Trump's hurricane, it was Trump this and Trump that, we need help, the devastation is so great, Trump is botching up our aid, Trump is playing politics with the hurricane. Blah Trump blah Trump. He's a disaster.

This year, under Biden, the media aren't mentioning the hurricane hardly at all, even though many have called it worse than Trump's hurricane. And, the whole place was without power before the hurricane even got there.



No begs for help, we need help, the devastation is so great, Biden is botching up our aid, Biden is playing politics with the hurricane. No nodda. Even though this hurricane is worse than Trump's the media have treated it as no big deal regarding the president and no aid has been asked. What a difference it makes with the media and the left whether it is Trump as president or Biden.

 

Just another day that ends in y. Surely you're not surprised.

 

Worse than Maria using what metric?

 

If by "the media" you mean Fox, that may be true. But I hear news about the hurricane at least every 20 to 30 minutes when I watch real news.

Oh, for God's sake! The Hurricane struck yesterday and is STILL affecting PR. At least let's see what help they need when it's done with the island before you say "it's the same as when Trump didn't do crap!"

Your desperation to compare with Trump's lack of response even MONTHS after the hurricane is the most pathetic partisanship.

 

I was living in PR during Hurricane Hugo and it sucked. PR gets a lot of hurricane warnings but they always seem to turn away at the last minute and that's what everyone thought Hugo would do, so the PRs did nothing until it was too late. Once they realized they were going to be hit all of people, yes, ALL of the people, who you would need to keep the damage as low as possible bolted. At the time, in San Juan they had power poles on top of buildings, tall buildings. The poles were 4x4' and exactly like you would use if building a patio cover. Needless to say they went down. Power on the island was largely gone and so were the people who ran home to be with their families. In San Juan, the engineers who should have opened the damns ran, so the damns overflowed and caused tremendous damage. For a long time we had no water, and when it came back on it was brown because it got mixed with sewage. I was lucky, I was living in Hato Rey at the time which had most of it's utilities underground so my electric came back on relatively fast compared to the rest of the island.

My company sent me tens of thousands of dollars worth of generators, chain saws and other equipment so I could get my guys back to work. Everything was stolen either at the airport of by the trucking companies. Everything. That's why I wasn't surprised that after the hurricane the left hammered Trump over the tons of supplies horded away or stolen with the governor and mayors somehow being involved. After the left blamed Trump for the hurricane they ignored the story about the corruption.

After those two hurricanes you'd think PR would have rebuilt itself to better withstand the fury of a hurricane. But PR being PR, they are corrupt to the point where that most likely didn't happen since power went out before the hurricane even hit. Everyone on the island knows the politicians are corrupt and they just shrug it off.

By the way, when I was there they were going to vote on a plebecite which gave them 3 options: Independence, remain a common wealth, or become and 'enhanced' common wealth which meant they would get more dollars from Uncle Sam and give up nothing in return. Democrat ideology at it's finest.

I sincerely hope AOC's abuela isn't inconvenienced by the storm this time like she was over the hurricane Trump pointed directly at her house.

 

Trump did respond and the puerto ricans stole what he sent them. Let's see how fast Biden can organize and get stuff to an island, I'm sure Buittigieg will get stuff there by the end of the day unless he encounters racist waterways.

 

Or they can't find any paper towels.

 

Yep, the PRs stole them, too. What did we horde here at the beginning of liberal lockdowns?

 

That's an odd statement. Something for puerto ricans that the puerto ricans stole. Or do you mean Trump sent something to his rich friends in Puerto Rico and the poor people stole it? "Roberto Capucha" (Robin Hood) maybe?

 

The Trump administration withheld money set aside for Puerto Rican relief
The administration of former President Donald Trump obstructed an investigation looking into why officials withheld about $20 billion in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, one of the deadliest U.S. natural disasters in over 100 years, a new report says.

A Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General report made public Thursday also found that tensions between the department and the Office of Management and Budget resulted in unprecedented procedural hurdles that produced delays in the disbursement of the congressionally approved funds.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino...s-blocked-puerto-rico-receiving-hurri-rcna749

The Trump administration delayed more than $20bn in hurricane relief aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, according to a report by the housing department’s office of the inspector General.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/22/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-trump-delayed-aid

Much of the aid that was finally sent was lost to mismanagement not stolen

FEMA lost visibility of about 38 percent of its commodity shipments to Puerto Rico, worth an estimated $257 million. Commodities successfully delivered to Puerto Rico took an average of 69 days to reach their final destinations,” the report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General found.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...-lost-puerto-rico-recovery-supplies-hurricane


President Trump lied about aid to Puerto Rico
President Donald Trump claims that “Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane” and that it received “more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before.” Neither of those statements is true.

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as of the end of last year, Puerto Rico had actually received about $11.2 billion in disaster relief payments since 2017.
In all, the federal government has allocated nearly $41 billion,

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/trump-misleads-on-aid-to-puerto-rico/

Now, what are your statistics showing Puerto Ricans stole all this stuff?

 

That's because Biden declared a national Emergency during the hurricane and deployed FEMA before it was over. Context and timeline do matter. Joe's will not be tossing paper towels.

 

I believe it was hydrooxychloroquine and ivermectin.

 

Ummmmmm, the power was out everywhere before the hurricane even hit. Then it got worse.

 

Non sequitur to my post; why not debate against the specifics I posted which totally addresses YOUR OP whine?

 

Dude.... I'm afraid you lost credibility when you opened a thread complaining about the response to the hurricane, while the hurricane was still wreaking havoc on the island. Obviously you were too quick to judge the response. This made it abundantly clear that your criticism was purely partisan and had nothing to do with concern for the island's inhabitants.

Next time, you might want to wait two or three days and see if the response is comparable to Trump's when he abandoned a territory of which he was President even weeks after it had been devastated. Most likely because he didn't even know that it was part of the United States.

 

Only in my local news. Biden signed the executive order, but Puerto Ricans are extremely weary of what they will get with this federal response based on the last time. At least, no politics was in play here by the Biden Administration unlike what Trump did because he still thinks Puerto Ricans are not Americans at all still.

But because of Queen Elizabeth's death and the history being made, national news focused on that because that is what makes them money.

 

Face the facts, the media attacks Trump and not Biden and this hurricane is worse than Trump's. Not a peep out of the left.

 

Oh dear God! You actually believe that the attack on Trump was because of the hurricane's strength?

President's have a lot of power. But none to make a hurricane better or worse. You might be surprised to learn that not even Trump had that power.

 

Asked and answered and all you did was continue to whine and ignore THE FACTS below (answers in red in case you miss it again and just deflect):
Because Biden declared a national Emergency during the hurricane and deployed FEMA before it was over. Context and timeline do matter. Joe's will not be tossing paper towels.

Now, when you can counter the FACTS in my post, I'll charitably bump your thread again, until then flail away.

 

Nice, you have stories.

I lived through Hurricane Hugo and do you have any idea what occurs when such a thing happens? We could have written a check the day after the hurricane ended and it would not have done anything because the people who write these stories don't know how things work. Let's say a bridge gets knocked out and PR wants to use the relief money to rebuild it, what happens is they're told the money isn't available yet but soon will be, so get your engineers to start designing a new bridge and start taking bids on contracts, by the time that's done you'll have the money.

Oh, you need 500 bulldozers, eh? Well, you see, we currently don't have 500 bulldozers sitting in Florida just waiting for a hurricane to hit Puerto Rico, and if we did we might not have any ships available to deliver them to you. BTW, your harbors were destroyed, how were you planning to unload these bulldozers? By the time your harbors are in use we'll be sending you bulldozers.

I worked for a company that had 90% of the cable tv construction and installation contracts on the island, more than 250 were under me. After the hurricane the cable companies wanted me to ramp up with supplies and man power in order to rebuild their systems. Manpower took a while, it's not easy to find another 200 people willing to go to an island that just got ravaged, but we got them. Equipment and supplies were a big problem. Everything we needed had to be ordered and then shipped, and believe it or not, the way PR does things with shipments arriving on the island could mean you might not ever know the stuff is there for weeks after it's delivered, and when you were notified, before you can receive that shipment I had to go pay the 19.5% import tax on the stuff. But what can you expect from an island where every single car registration expires on the same day.

Ok, so it takes a long time for my stuff to arrive (you wouldn't believe how much of it vanished into thin air), do you think the relief supplies were any different? Yes, some stuff arrived by plane, and because San Juan's airport isn't as large as say LAX or Kennedy, it has to limit how many planes can come and go. But then again, it can only deliver what was available.

So the time it took to get approval is meaningless unless someone said they weren't going to approve of the relief money. The government told people to buy stuff and they'll have the money before it arrives.

Now you're probably thinking about Roosevelt Roads, the navy base in Fajardo, right? Yes, they brought stuff in, but they brought it by ship and they only brought was they could quickly pack up and ship. They tried to help out with removing trees and mud from the roads but that eventually slowed to a crawl because their tractors were being stolen at night. In one well reported story, one of those 30 foot long earth movers, the kind with the blade between the front and back wheels, was stolen. On that island EVERYTHING was stolen.

I could go on for a long time, but taking time to approve of relief money is not the same you aint getting any relief money. Order what you need and then pay for it with the check we'll be sending you. And from all accounts, a lot of the relief money and supplies sent to PR after Hugo were stolen. If the US government was aware of how much got stolen they may have wanted assurances after the next hurricane that it won't be stolen again and the facts show that it was.

BTW, I didn't read your articles, I didn't need to since I lived through the entire government fiasco (mostly PR's) and didn't think I'd learn anything if I read about it again.

Welcome to Puerto Rico, The Island Of Enchantment.

 

Remember when the Puerto Rican government got caught hoarding all of the Reconstruction supplies that Trump sent?

I bet you were one of the ones on here bashing Trump.

The damn government was sitting on warehouses full of infrastructure supplies to rebuild the electric grid.

 

"The damn government"? You understand that "the damn government" was TRUMP, or no?

It's hilarious that you didn't know that Trump was the President of Puerto Rico.

 

What's even more hilarious, Trump didn't know he was POTUS of Puerto Rico either..

 

I didn't say that at all. I said the media attacked Trump relentlessly for a hurricane, due to their lefty bias, while the current hurricane, which is much worse than Trump's, doesn't have the media attacking Biden. He gets a free pass.