“An examination of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data and records demonstrates the degree to which the recovery from Hurricanes Maria and Irma on America’s Caribbean islands has been stalled compared with some of the most disaster-prone states on the mainland, leaving the islands’ critical infrastructure in squalor and limbo,” report Mark Walker and Zolan Kanno-Youngs in the New York Times.
The Times notes that, according to FEMA officials, only 190 long-term recovery projects have been funded in Puerto Rico out of more than 9,000 requests. On the United States Virgin Islands, the numbers are still dismal, but better than Puerto Rico, with 218 projects funded out of 1,500-plus requests. By contrast, about 3,700 large and small permanent work projects had obligated funding in Texas, two years after Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast in August 2017 and more than 3,700 such projects had been funded over that time in Florida.
The disparity, note Walker and Kanno-Youngs, highlights a vast gap in “how a federal government in Washington has treated citizens on the mainland, with voting representatives in Congress and a say in presidential contests, compared with citizens on the islands.”
“At the end of the day, we’re talking about the life and the well-being of human beings,” notes Dyma Williams, the acting chief executive at the Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital on St. Croix. “I hate to make the distinction about American versus not American, but at the end of the day, we’re not being treated the same way as other Americans are being treated.”
FEMA officials claim part of the problem lies with how US recovery assistance is delivered. Local governments or charities usually front the money to at least begin construction and then are reimbursed by FEMA. But as Chris Curie, director of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) team that studies disaster relief, notes, “Because of the fiscal challenges and their situation financially, they don’t have the funding or access to loans. So they are completely reliant on FEMA.”