President Donald Trump lashed out at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz on Saturday, claiming the Democrat had been instructed to blame Trump’s White House for a lack of aid reaching Puerto Ricans left destitute by Hurricane Maria, when Cruz’s lack of leadership was to blame.
The President’s statement was unusual, and criticized by both parties as largely inappropriate — but as Sunday dawned, it became clear that, while perhaps poorly worded, Trump’s allegations were not incorrect.
Cruz delivered a press conference late Saturday in front of hundreds of cartons of unopened food that were sitting on the tarmac at San Juan’s airport, and Sunday morning, word spread that thousands of pounds of aid were sitting, still in shipping containers, in the port of San Juan.
Even MSNBC was forced to confirm that lifesaving supplies, some from the U.S., can’t reach their intended destinations because Puerto Rico’s leadership is having a difficult time wrangling their own disaster aid. Shipping company Crowley told local media that 9,500 containers of food, water, medicine, clothing and other supplies are sitting at the dock, but they’ve only been able to dispatch about 4% of the 3,000 shipping containers to which Crowley has access.
According to KTLA and Puerto Rico’s governor, the island is suffering from a trucking shortage — only about 20% of truckers have reported back to work after Maria — as well as fuel shortages, and a lack of functioning cell towers, making communication difficult.
“The problem has been with the logistics, the parts of the supply chain that move the cargo from our terminal to the shelves or to the tables of the people in Puerto Rico,” Crowley’s vice president said Wednesday. “This hurricane was catastrophic.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, however, has been instrumental in helping to rebuild crushed roads and bridges, and get supplies moving inland from the port. U.S. Defense Logistics Agency is transporting 124,000 gallons of diesel fuel to the island (they departed the U.S. on September 23), and FEMA says it has restored power to several thousand people in Puerto Rico’s major cities. The Federal Highway Administration says that just yesterday the agency made an additional $40 million available for emergency road repair in Puerto Rico, on top of the millions in aid already flowing to the island.
FEMA stood by its hurricane response Saturday, blasting the mayor’s lack of leadership, and claiming Cruz has not participated in any joint agency meetings to address the devastation.
“The problem that we have with the mayor unfortunately is that unity of command is ultimately what’s needed to be successful in this response,” FEMA administrator Brock Long told CNN. “What we need is for the mayor, the good mayor, to make her way to the joint field office and get plugged into what’s going on and be successful.”
It’s not immediately clear where the breakdown is, but it does not appear to be with the Trump White House.