In the midst of the collapse of the island’s electrical system after Hurricane Fiona, the Bureau for Emergency and Disaster Management failed to comply with the Essential Communicators Act, which compels that agency to facilitate access to fuel for broadcasters, who found it hard to fill their backup electric generators with diesel.
An analysis by CPI and The Post found that despite ample federal funding, less than 1 percent of the FEMA and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) money slated for the island’s public water utility corporation since 2018 has been set aside to buy generators for water pumps. Local officials instead relied on a patchwork supply of emergency units but failed to get many in place ahead of the storm and supply them with enough diesel.
Aside from the public housing management business, for which federal authorities are investigating Walter and Eduardo Pierluisi Isern, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi’s cousins, the Pierluisi Isern and Pierluisi González-Coya families have more than 20 active companies in real estate, consulting and business and real estate management.
In the Bauta Abajo sector in Orocovis, in the central mountainous region, there are no power lines or poles on the ground. But 12 days after Hurricane Fiona, which produced devastating floods in southwestern Puerto Rico on September 18, the 1,308 people who live in this neighborhood are battling a storm of isolation and lack of electricity.
An audit by the US Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General found irregularities in the payment of $17.1 million that the Federal Emergency Management Agency disbursed to nonprofit organizations for post-disaster work in Puerto Rico.
The tool is not yet working to its total capacity because hospitals have not completed the training. About 50% of the information on deaths is still collected manually.
Communities around the irrigation channels, whose conditions worsened due to the flooding caused by Hurricane Fiona, will continue to be at risk because there are no immediate solutions to prevent obstructions during extraordinary rainfall events, experts and the government of Puerto Rico told the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, in Spanish). Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) set aside $62 million in Hurricane María recovery funds for permanent work projects for this network of irrigation channels, the process is still in the design stage, one of the steps required by the federal agency to allocate the funds and, eventually, disburse them. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) submitted three permanent works projects to FEMA in October 2021 for the three irrigation districts it manages in Patillas in the South, Isabela in the North and Lajas in the southwestern coast. These structures belonged to the former Puerto Rico Water Resources Authority (PRWRA), created in 1941 to manage the reservoirs used for electricity generation. Irrigation channels are part of that system and now provide water for agriculture in those areas.
Hurricane Fiona’s first gusts were barely blowing when dozens of mayors had to improvise solutions. When they arrived at the locations that the government of Puerto Rico certified as shelters, they found they had no water tanks or power generators. At that time, a copy of Act 88 sat on a desk.
