Navy orders another ship to Puerto Rico

U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service agents provide disaster relief supplies, food rations and water to victims of Hurricane Maria at Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, on Thursday. Photo by PO3 David Flores/U.S. Coast Guard/UPI

Sept. 29 (UPI) — The U.S. Navy is sending an amphibious assault ship, which had been assisting in hurricane recovery efforts in Dominica, to Puerto Rico, the U.S. military announced Friday.

U.S. Southern Command said the USS Wasp arrived near Dominica on Sept. 21 and assisted in evacuations and the delivery of humanitarian aid. It also helped rescue two people from a plane crash in the ocean.

A news release from SOUTHCOM said the ship will now be sent to assist U.S. territories in the Caribbean. Unnamed officials told The Washington Post the ship will specifically travel to Puerto Rico.

“The airlift and transport capabilities of amphibious ships make them uniquely suited to support disaster relief operations in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster,” SOUTHCOM said.

The USS Kearsarge and USS Oak Hill are already providing disaster relief in Puerto Rico.

More than a week after Hurricane Maria blew through, the entire island of Puerto Rico is still mostly without power — much of its electrical grid damaged and destroyed.

Power lines are down and power poles litter streets all over the island. The majority of Puerto Rico is still in the dark, without air conditioning and without refrigeration.

In the capital of San Juan, the few buildings with electricity are running off generator power.

Pool Photo by Shawn Thew/UPI

Friday, President Donald Trump again pledged to get aid to the island.

“The electrical grid and other infrastructure were already in very, very poor shape [prior to the hurricane]. They were at their life’s end, and now everything has been wiped out. We will need to start all over again. We are literally starting from scratch,” he said at a meeting of U.S. manufacturing leaders.

Earlier Friday, Trump said on Twitter that his administration is doing what it can to help.

“Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: ‘The Administration and the President, every time we’ve spoken, they’ve delivered,'” he tweeted.

“The fact is that Puerto Rico has been destroyed by two hurricanes. Big decisions will have to be made as to the cost of its rebuilding!”

Officials say it will take up to six months to fully restore power — but even before Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, the island’s electrical grid was a source of worry and problems.

In 2016, the island endured a three-day blackout because of a fire at a main electricity plant. A report by private consultants Synapse Energy Associates wrote after the fire that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s “generation, transmission and distribution systems are falling apart and reliability is suffering.”

It added that PREPA “desperately requires an infusion of capital — monetary, human and intellectual — to restore a functional utility.”

Those comments were made before the hurricane destroyed 55 percent of the island’s electrical transmission towers and wiped out the power grid, government officials said.

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority is the largest public utility company in the United States, and notorious for mismanagement, Bloomberg News reported Friday. Despite plenty of sunshine and wind on the island, the authority obtains 3 percent of its power from renewable resources — the U.S. average is 15 percent — and it cannot find investors.

Puerto Ricans endure blackouts at four to five times the national rate, the Synapse Energy study said, and pay more for electricity than residents of any U.S. state but Hawaii.

The island, technically a commonwealth of the United States, is also dealing with a mounting debt crisis, noted by Tom Bossert, Department of Homeland Security adviser, Friday on CNN.

“First, we always have big discussions after disasters pertaining to cost but what you need to know is Puerto Rico started this one $72 billion in debt,” he said. “With them being in debt, they don’t have enough ready liquid cash to pay their normal share [of recovery costs] like Florida and Texas had ready, money to pay. The federal government is paying 100 percent of the tab here to make sure lives are saved. We’ll worry about the big decisions later.”

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