Maddening.
3,000 shipping containers packed with food water & medicene have been sitting at the port in Puerto Rico since Saturday pic.twitter.com/LJ0ETpmnOf— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) September 27, 2017
Even with the U.S. scrambling to save face after being criticized for the slow response to Hurricane Maria’s destruction of Puerto Rico, the island’s devastated infrastructure is slowing recovery efforts. Case in point: While thousands of shipping containers are already in the Port of San Juan, there are not enough truck drivers to haul the supplies, not enough fuel to gas up the trucks they do have, and a large portion of the island’s roads are impassable. CBS News’ David Begnaud tweeted the above footage on Wednesday, but as CNN reports, the problem persists.
According to Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló, since the island’s cell towers are down, additional truck drivers are proving difficult to track down and coordinate. The governor says that this has left 9,500 shipping containers sitting in the port while citizens face shortages. According to a representative from Crowley, a shipping company, only four percent of the supplies it has in 3,000 containers in the port have been unloaded and sent out — now, valuable food, water, clothes, medicine, and building materials are going unused. This has led to Puerto Ricans waiting for hours in lines for dwindling supplies of food, gas, and other items.
“The problem has been with the logistics, the parts of the supply chain that move the cargo from our terminal to the shelves or to the tables of the people in Puerto Rico,” Crowley vice president Jose Ayala said Wednesday. “This hurricane was catastrophic.”
(Via CNN)