Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria were devastating. Category 5 Irma tore off roofs and took out power and stripped the trees bare in the Virgin Islands. It killed power in most of Puerto Rico. Irma hit Florida as a Category 4 storm, ripping up the length of Florida. Category 4 Maria destroyed homes across Puerto Rico and finished destroying the power grid. Weeks earlier, Harvey hovered over Houston for days, dumping 50 inches of rain and creating unprecedented flooding.
Hurricane Don might be the worst yet. Don threatens to hover over the U.S. and dump on us for another three and a half years. The day after Maria brought apocalyptic devastation to Puerto Rico, Don left for his golf resort in New Jersey:
Power is still down in Puerto Rico for those without generators and the fuel to run them. Clean water is scarce. Neither food nor water are reaching Americans desperate for it. Puerto Ricans cannot drive over to a neighboring state for a clean bed, a hot shower, and a filling meal. Response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was swifter. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz has had enough of the meager response from Washington.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency asked people to register online where there is no power or Internet. Cruz on Friday publicly demanded FEMA figure it out and improvise:
"If you register for FEMA on the Internet, you're OK. Well, we don't have any Internet. We barely have phones. We don't have power anywhere... this is not standard operating procedure. Everything has just gone away so you have to improvise," she said.
Trump said things in Puerto Rico are going "really well."
San Juan's mayor: "I am begging anyone that can hear us to save us from dying" pic.twitter.com/TiEoR4euq0
The reality-show president responded to the deepening crisis Friday by heading to his Bedminster, N.J. golf resort for the weekend, marking the 66th time he has visited one of his 17 golf courses in his presidency. That is beyond tone deaf. It is brain dead.
"This is an emergency. For God sake, the food has to get into my people's hand" pic.twitter.com/eSsWw4QrFR
In Puerto Rico, people are drinking out of creeks, San Juan's mayor reported. The island's agricultural sector — family farms, mostly — has been growing at 3 to 5 percent per year, reports Business Insider. Now crops are drowned and farms destroyed. Dead horses and farm animals rot where they fell. [BI Gallery.]
Aid workers have warned that recovery efforts in Puerto Rico could take years due to extensive damage to the island’s agriculture and the downing of 2,400 miles of power transmission lines. One local official said that the devastation may have set the island back “nearly 20 to 30 years.”
This president doesn't have an attention span of 20-30 minutes.
Cruz used the news conference to ask U.S. citizens to send help and requested that news reporters send a “mayday” emergency call to the world.
“I know your hearts. You’re loving and caring. Help us. Show the world what we can do together,” she said.
The videos above were from yesterday. This one below was posted Tuesday, September 26, the morning after the duffer in D.C. broke his silence about Maria's September 20 devastation of a U.S. territory:
One wonders if the famously germophobic president will even bother visiting a San Juan hospital when he arrives on the island next week. There might be blood.
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