Three weeks after Hurricane Maria struck, Puerto Ricans continue to lead perilous lives, without access to water or electricity, and relief packages have only exacerbated the country’s serious debt problem.
ON SEPTEMBER 20,HURRICANE MARIA SWEPT through the United States territory of Puerto Rico and devastated the island (“A tale of two islands”, October 27). The death toll is not yet confirmed. It is hard to know what is happening since the roads in the interior of the island remain impassable and communications networks are down.
Three weeks after Hurricane Maria left the island, the 3.4 million Puerto Ricans remain in the dark. It is estimated that 85 per cent of the population will not get power for at least six months and that 40 per cent of the islanders will not have access to drinking water. Waterborne diseases threaten the people, whose health has been further endangered by the threadbare hospitals.
The government of the island and U.S. President Donald Trump have been exaggerating the situation in the island. For instance, Puerto Rico’s Governor, Ricardo Rossello, said that 63 of the island’s 69 hospitals were fully operational. The Centre for Investigative Journalism (Puerto Rico) suggested that this was impossible. A week before Governor Rossello made these comments, 56 hospitals were closed. When the staff from the centre called many of the hospitals that were said to be operational, they found them not in any state to receive patients. The government suggests that the death toll was somewhere in the vicinity of 45. But Representatives Nydia Velasquez (Democrat of New York) and Bennie Thompson (Democrat of Mississippi) wrote to the Department of Homeland Security suggesting that the death toll was being “woefully under reported”. They say that at least 450 people might have died in this calamity.
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