US Agency Recognizes Aid Failures in Puerto Rico Due to Hurricane

In a report released Thursday, the entity acknowledged that its plans for a crisis in the territory with the Commonwealth's status of this country were based on a disaster concentrated like a tsunami or earthquake not in a big cyclone like the one that devastated the island last September

According to the report, FEMA has greatly underestimated the amount of food and fresh water it would need, and the difficulty of obtaining additional supplies.

The storm arrived, the agency's warehouse in Puerto Rico was almost empty and its contents had been moved to help the US Virgin Islands, which were hit by another such phenomenon. Two weeks earlier, the New York Times quoted

The report describes an initially chaotic and disorganized relief effort on the island, which has been plagued by logistical problems and has spread to the most long food mission of the country's history. According to the document, planning in the region was incomplete, did not sufficiently take into account the possibility of multiple major disasters over a short period of time and did not calculate the possible impact of "poorly maintained infrastructure".

"The FEMA management acknowledged that the agency could have predicted better than the severity of hurricanes Irma and Maria would cause significant long-term damage to the infrastructure of the territories," the text says.

The entity also acknowledged that emergency managers at all levels could have made greater use of existing information to proactively plan and meet such challenges, both before and immediately after hurricanes.

Although the agency is distributing 130 million meals as a result of the disasters that hit the country in 2017, including 35 million in Puerto Rico, the report says that the agency Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of State Security, said in a statement accompanying the paper that it had taken longer than planned to secure supplies and lose track of the badistance provided. provides a transformative roadmap for how they will respond to future catastrophic incidents.

FEMA and Donald Trump's administration received strong criticism after the pbadage of Maria because many sources accused the federal authorities of responding slowly and not wanting to allocate the necessary resources for the reconstitution of the territory.

ag / mar