Give him a 10 out of 10. Those paper towels were awesome
by digby
Yesterday, Trump met with the Governor of Puerto Rico, whom he treated as his personal lapdog essentially daring him to complain or he'd make things even worse for the people there. He repeatedly compared the "fantastic" recovery in Florida and Texas to Puerto Rico constantly referring to its bad infrastructure and how it was a mess and how the people didn't go to work, which he claimed he understood because they had families without homes, all the while barely repressing a sneer at their lack of gumption. It was sickening. When asked to rate his response to the disaster he instantly said "I give myself a 10 out of 10." Uhm, no:
In contrast with Texas after Hurricane Harvey and Florida after Irma, where thousands of repair workers rushed in to restring power lines, only a few hundred electrical workers from outside the island have arrived to help. It was not until Saturday that the Puerto Rican government said it had the federal funding needed to bring in more workers.
And until a week ago, the small Montana company hired to get the lights back on had only 165 workers on the ground; it now has about 300. In comparison, 5,300 workers from outside the region converged on coastal Texas in the days after Hurricane Harvey to restore a power loss that was about a tenth the size, said Larry Jones, a spokesman for AEP Texas. Electricity was back on for almost everyone within two weeks.
In Florida, 18,000 outside workers went in after Hurricane Irma knocked out electricity to most of the state last month, according to FPL, Florida’s largest power company.
In Puerto Rico, the brunt of the work has been left to the 900 members of local crews.
Industry experts said poor planning, a slow response by power officials and Puerto Rico’s dire financial straits had led to a situation that would be unfathomable in the continental United States. Logistical challenges — like where to house the thousands of extra workers needed to get the lights back on — still have not been resolved.
“Thirty days after the storm, I see very little progress,” said Eduardo Bhatia, an opposition senator who in 2014 wrote an energy reform law. He added, “I don’t see the boots on the field doing the work, and that is a tragedy.”
At the White House on Thursday, President Trump said the administration deserved a 10 for its response to the hurricanes that struck Puerto Rico and other parts of the United States.