Feeding Puerto Rico After the Storm
Our biggest fear is that we rebuild the same weak system that we had before María
This story is part of The Trump 45, a special package about Trump’s impact on individual lives.
Two days after Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico, Crystal Díaz expected to find impassable roads to the small bed and breakfast she’d recently opened in the mountains of Cayey. She feared the wood-frame house had been destroyed in the Category 4 cyclone, and she felt anxious to assess the damage.
Instead, her drive home was clear. Residents had pulled together whatever tools they had, from chainsaws to diggers, to clear the debris themselves. “They didn’t expect the municipality, the state government, much less the federal government to come help,” she said.
It turned out that they had reason to be skeptical. The federal relief effort was notoriously slow, even after Hurricane María wiped out much of an already fragile infrastructure. President Donald Trump drew criticism for failing to respond with troops and aid as rapidly as he had for similar disasters on the U.S. mainland. And as the death toll from María reached nearly 3,000 in Puerto Rico, crucial water and food supplies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took weeks to reach isolated…
