When the Harvard study of estimated hurricane deaths in Puerto Rico was released, I quickly posted about it. Then I sat wondering if any of the people in charge of responding to the disaster that has unfolded in front of us for the last eight months will ever be held responsible.
I’m sitting here typing with Kool and the Gang’s Who's Gonna Take The Weight playing in the background:
Because I believe one day someone or something
Is gonna wanna judge who's creating
All this corruption and death and pollution
And all these difficult situations on earth
And He's gonna wanna know
Who's gonna take the weight
Who's gonna take the weight
I don't know, I don't know
The answer to my own question is: probably not. Only a massive movement can effect that kind of change, and there is currently no massive movement in support of our citizens in Puerto Rico. Oh, there will probably be someone fired in Puerto Rico as a scapegoat, but the source of the failure will sail on, unpunished and free to enact more damage.
The list of heads that should roll like Trump’s tossed paper towels should surely start with our erstwhile commander in chief’s. His botched ‘chiefiness’ was on display when he finally showed up in Puerto Rico on October 3, 2017. Remember, Maria made landfall on September 20. It took him two weeks to drag his ass to Puerto Rico to exhibit his braggadociousness.
While there, he chortled about the death numbers and patted himself and Gov. Ricardo Rosselló on the back for a job well done.
Do you remember watching the clown show below?
New York Magazine reported:
On Tuesday, President Trump visited Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria almost two weeks ago. The U.S. territory is still very much in dire straits; only 5 percent of the people there have power, and about half have access to potable water. The economic future looks bleak.
But the president seemed to be in a celebratory mood.
“I hate to tell you this, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” he said (joked? It’s hard to tell) to an assembled group of elected officials, including the territory’s governor Ricardo Rosselló. Trump was referring to disaster aid pending in Congress. FEMA has spent much less on Puerto Rico thus far than it has on Florida and Texas, also hit by hurricanes in the last month.
…
And, in a bit of unseemly showmanship, he commented on the relatively low death toll in Puerto Rico, which currently stands at 16, even though it’s almost certain to rise.
“Every death is a horror,” he said. But he compared Maria’s death toll favorably to a “real catastrophe” like Hurricane Katrina, where “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of people died.
Those of us who were paying attention, who had family and friends on the island, already knew how bad things were. Irma had just knocked out power to more than 1 million people. Questions about the death toll were already being raised by Puerto Rican journalists from the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI), and by relief groups:
National Nurse United, the nation's largest union for registered nurses, said the study confirmed what volunteer nurses who went to the island in the days and weeks after the Sept. 20 landfall witnessed — residents "left to die" by a federal response that "failed its own American citizens."
“Nurses on the ground saw that people were dying," said Bonnie Castillo, executive director of the union. "Our volunteer RNs came back to the U.S. and said again and again, ‘The people of Puerto Rico are dying. Do something!'"
Unfortunately Trump isn’t going to resign and we will have to either see him impeached or voted out of office. Either way, the blood will remain on his hands, but he will go unpunished.
The mainland media, especially the networks and cable outlets, are also to blame for the way they have bungled coverage and failed to pressure and interrogate Trump and his inept administrators. And it’s happening again right now.
Roseanne, a bigoted TV persona, trumped cable news coverage of Puerto Rico’s dead.
And although the hashtag #TrumpsKatrina has resurfaced on twitter, it is not trending.
Given the fact that there are predictions that the death toll numbers will continue to rise, perhaps we should call this “Trump’s Galveston,” though I’m not sure that many Americans know that historical reference to the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.
The deadliest natural disaster in American history remains the 1900 hurricane in the island city of Galveston, Texas. On September 8, a category four hurricane descended on the town, destroying more than 3,600 buildings with winds surpassing 135 miles per hour.
Estimates of the death toll range from 6,000 to 12,000, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Tragically, the magnitude of the disaster could’ve been lessened if the U.S. Weather Bureau hadn’t implemented such poor communication policies.
Next in line on my list is Brock Long, who is head of FEMA. Though “Heck of a job Brownie” became a Katrina meme, there have been no consequences for Brock Long’s failures and though Daily Kos blogger Chef Bobby Neary raised the issue of his protected status on the island in “Heck of a Job Brockie! FEMA's Brock Long Breaks Own Arm Patting Himself on the Back in Puerto Rico,” Long’s tenure continues.
There was little or no coverage in the press of this Senate hearing on October 31, 2017:
Federal Response to Hurricanes. Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Brock Long was among the witnesses who testified at a hearing on the federal government’s response to various hurricanes that hit U.S. territory during the 2017 season. A majority of the hearing focused on the response to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where millions remained without power and fresh water access months after the storms hit. Following the hearing, Committee Ranking Member Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) and some of the witnesses took questions from the press
Third on my list is Ricardo “Little Ricky” Rosselló, governor of Puerto Rico and member of the Statehood Party (mostly Republicans and dominated by island elites). This ensured that he would suck up to Trump as often as he could. He isn’t due for re-election until 2020, but vocal calls for him to go are already filling the newspapers on the island. And there are loud calls from the opposition party for the resignation of his appointee Héctor Pesquera.
Part of the problem with U.S. mainland reportage is that we get very little sense of what is being reported on the island. The major newspapers, pundits, and radio personality broadcasts are in Spanish.
To make matters worse, still too many mainlanders don’t know Puerto Ricans are American citizens or that Puerto Ricans pay taxes. They also aren’t aware that the same bigots who support Trump’s vendetta against immigrants and people who are Spanish-speaking see no reason why we should do a damn thing for Puerto Rico.
The one mainland television reporter assigned to a Puerto Rico beat, whose coverage has been widely lauded, is David Begnaud. My feelings about him are very mixed. At least the CBS network sent someone. However, his lack of facility with Spanish and his reliance on “official” government reports has essentially made him a stenographer, not an investigative journalist.
He is reporting on the Harvard study story.
Sigh. “Harvard wouldn’t tell us.” WTF? I’m a researcher who has worked on similar studies and of course you don’t give out the names of informants, who are guaranteed confidentiality.
If Begnaud was paying attention he would have spent time reporting on what was being reported on deaths from the beginning, rather than just posting stats from the PR.gov website and now using Facebook to talk to folks.
The information about deaths has been out there. However, the information was not getting to the mainland populace. Much of what has been covered has been in national newspapers like the Washington Post, and I question how many folks in the U.S. actually read them.
Yes, we here at Daily Kos have been covering what has really been gong on since Day One, as have bloggers from other sites. However, we don’t have the media power of the networks or the big three cable networks.
On Sept 30, 2017, Daily Kos blogger Pakalolo wrote “María’s dead in Puerto Rico are underreported.” Pakalolo was covering a report from investigative oeporter Omaya Sosa Pasqual, co-founder of CPI.
On September 28, 2017, Sosa wrote an article in the Miami Herald titled “Hurricane Maria’s death toll in Puerto Rico is higher than official count, experts say”:
On Wednesday, the Puerto Rico government, maintained that the official number of deaths as a result of the catastrophe was 16. But the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, for its initials in Spanish) has confirmed that there are dozens of hurricane-related deaths and the number could rise to the hundreds.
The storm-related fatalities are mounting with each passing day, and official numbers are not counting patients who are not receiving dialysis, oxygen and other essential services.
The dead are at the hospital morgues, which are at capacity and in remote places where the government has yet to go. In many cases, families are unaware of the deaths. The government’s Demographic Registry is responsible for certifying deaths so bodies can be removed by funeral homes, many of which are not operating because of lack of resources. The agency began to certify some of the dead Monday, Health Secretary Rafael Rodríguez-Mercado confirmed in an interview.
Public Safety Secretary Héctor Pesquera told the CPI that the names of the dead because of the hurricane will not be revealed until relatives can be notified. The continuing lack of communication has kept many people from knowing the whereabouts of their families. Since the storm’s immediate aftermath, many people have gone daily to radio stations so the on-air personalities can announce the names of family members with whom they have been unable to communicate.
Sosa is interviewed here:
A Harvard study has found that at least 4,645 people have died as a result of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, 70 times more than Puerto Rico officials claim. We speak to Omaya Sosa, co-founder of Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, who first reported the government's official death toll was underreported.
She was also on Democracy Now.
Latino Rebels founder Julio Ricardo Varela, was quick to deflate MSNBC pretensions in this recent round of coverage, such as it is.
I used advanced search for Twitter to go back and take a look at what was being tweeted out from Sosa and CPI:
CPI has not spared the island government’s culpability:
This story reported on how 60 percent of victims died in health facilities:
A sample of cases of Hurricane María’s fatal victims documented and analyzed preliminarily by the CPI and qz.com, a specialized media in data journalism, points out that more than 60% of the deaths linked to the disaster occurred in hospitals, CDTs and homes in the island.
Those cases, reported directly by relatives and acquaintances through a form developed by both media outlets and public health experts, showed that the majority of those deaths took place in the weeks after the hurricane, not the day of the event, and according to family and friends of the deceased in the testimonies provided in the forms and subsequent follow-up interviews, they occurred in circumstances related to problems with basic services at these facilities or other health services operations such as drug stores, medical offices, specialized treatment centers for dialysis and chemotherapy, that were not offering vital services or that had to close their doors, leaving patients adrift.
Among the problems reported are faults in medical equipment or an inability to use them due to lack of electricity, unhealthy conditions due to humidity and heat, lack of supplies such as oxygen and medicines, and lack of facilities to refrigerate medications. These situations continued to occur weeks and months after María’s passing, according to the sample.
Millán, as well as Ada Santiago, specialist of the Health Department’s Coalitions, agreed that the big problem in hospitals and other health facilities during the emergency, in addition to the lack of drinking water and electricity, was the oxygen supply.
“Every hospital had oxygen problems,” said Santiago.
“The problem with oxygen, which perhaps people don’t understand, is that its private companies [that supply it.] The hospitals’ job is not giving you oxygen, it is attending emergencies. A person in need of oxygen, in a declared emergency, is not a priority for a hospital, so they were not receiving them. That is standard; In an emergency, hospitals will limit their services, because they are limited in terms of personnel and resources. They will focus only on emergency situations,” said Millán.
You should read the entire piece. It is distressing and disturbing because we are moving into hurricane season—again. And though Trump, Rosselló, and FEMA make noises about how well prepared things now are, my feeling is that CPI is Puerto Rico’s Cassandra, and no one who can fix this is listening or willing to do anything about it.
Above all, let us remember that those numbers—no matter how many we ultimately wind up with—are people. Family members and loved ones.
This Twitter thread was posted by Puerto Rican journalist Andrea González-Ramírez .
You can follow her thread on Twitter, but for those who don’t do Twitter here are a few of the tweets:
Thank you to everyone who continues to donate and support relief efforts in Puerto Rico. They are still sorely needed.
Heads will roll only if we get our folks to the polls, get Democrats back in power in Washington, and assure that those Democrats are paying attention to Puerto Rico.