Posted on 12/26/2017 5:24:20 AM PST by cll
MOROVIS, Puerto Rico – Three days before Christmas, Doris Martinez and daughter Miriam Narvaez joined their neighbors in a line outside city hall in Morovis, a town of 30,000 people still living without electricity in the mountains of central Puerto Rico a month after Hurricane Maria battered the U.S. island.
They waited two hours under the searing sun for their twice-a-week handout — 24 bottles of water and a cardboard box filled with basic foods such as tortillas, canned vegetables and cereal.
Martinez, a 73-year-old cancer survivor, balanced the water atop the food and picked her way up a steep hill to the home where she lives alone, washing and wringing out her clothes by hand and locking herself in at night, afraid of robbers. Her 53-year-old daughter loaded her food and water into her car and drove off to the public housing complex where she would then have to wait with dozens of other neighbors in another line to cook on one of six gas burners in the administrator's office.
"Things are not good," Narvaez said as she headed toward home.
This is life in Puerto Rico more than three months after Maria destroyed the island's electrical grid. Gov. Ricardo Rossello promised in mid-October to restore 95 percent of electricity delivery by Dec. 15, but normality remains far off. Puerto Rico's Electric Power Authority says its system is generating at 70 percent of normal but it has no way of knowing how widely electricity is being distributed because the system that measures that isn't working.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Since FEMA stepped in, we are sending some line crews down to help out.
No one trusted broke ass PR.
The Puerto Rican government gave out $100 million in government employee bonuses, while asking for $100 million in emergency funds from the Federal Government.
My give-a-damn meter is running at a fairly low level.
FEMA stepped in? It’s more like FEMA has stepped on it. They’ve been inefficient, obstructive, sluggish, extremely bureaucratic and inflexible and actually working against economic recovery by hoarding resources like hotel rooms, rental cars, cargo shipping space and everything we need to help ourselves. People here gave up on government help a long time ago, to include the federal government. The only ones who have been outstanding help were the military and certain NGOs. And neighbors helping neighbors.
Temperature in PR this week is high 82-84 and high 40s at night. Hardly searing temps. They lost a month or two with the government not getting out supplies and workers refusing to lift a finger. If the infrastructure wasn’t so bad to begin with, things wouldn’t be so bad.
If they can’t survive this. What would they do if a Atomic EMP or Solar EMP hit the entire world? You’d be back to the 1800’s, noting electronic would work. Chaos would ensue, millions die of disease, hunger, no medical care, and mob rule. Few know how to survive with out electronics.
Grocery stores in the USA only carry a 3 day supply of food. Cities will be UNINHABITABLE. Government won’t function.
a town of 30,000 people still living without electricity in the mountains of central Puerto Rico
Isn’t this what the religion of Global Warming and going Green is all about? Living life without Electricity or Fossil Fuel Energy of any kind.
Doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy for the people who are expecting their government to help out, but not getting it.
I can't imagine people going without power for so long in today's age. But then again, I have seen areas in Honduras that don't have any electricity and the women continue to wash clothes by hand in the river.
As an aside, cold kills more people than hot weather and right now here in S.E. Michigan the temperature is 0......Loss of power for any substantial length of time would be devastating.
These were not bonuses, as in extra pay they wouldn’t have normally gotten. It’s hard to understand but this for mainlanders, but ‘Christmas Bonuses’ are legislated into wage and hour laws in Puerto Rico. Normally 6% of employees salaries - public or private - up to $10,000.00 is paid out in the first half of December. This is just like a Christmas Club savings account. Employers figure this legislated payroll expense into people’s salaries. I know this “benefit” costs me 30 cents an hour per employee, so I pay them that much less per hour throughout the year and then pay it in lump sum just before Christmas. It’s just a local idiosyncrasy already figured into budgets. That’s what the governor paid out. He had to.
This is what happens when you elect commie, Marxist and Socialist politicians. Now they’ve all moved to Florida to screw up that state. It’s a damn shame.
Ain't they all.
As well as "inefficient, obstructive, sluggish, and inflexible."
(tear it all down, man)
The military is the Federal government. The idea that PR’s have given up on government is comical. They are a huge contingent of the Free Shit Army.
The rural electric cooperatives from Missouri and Oklahoma have sent teams of linemen with equipment to countries in South America.
If they can fly these guys to Brazil and Columbia, why not Puerto Rico ?
Well you are right there, it does sound difficult for "mainlanders" to understand, because this is is a 'local idiosyncracy'.
Sounds like a ponzi scheme of some kind-factored into the pay for this year, but paid out of next year's budget.
It does make the talk of American "genocide" by Trump's supposed lack of money from the Federal Government from the Mayor of San Juan far more understandable. Anything to divert people from actually looking at her own books.
Those in pr seem to always vote for LIB loser socialist and criminals. They reap what they sow.
Decades of corrupt DEMOCRATIC politicians running the place eventually catches up.
The REAL downside is that many are leaving and streaming into Florida to become more dem votes.
I don't mean solar or anything trendy. I mean going back to the basics and also having the kinds of self-enclosed systems that exist for many isolated mountain cabins.
Yep. We woke up to -5. And a ton of snow. Your northern neighbor.
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