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| Thousands of containers sit, refrigerators running, in Port of San Juan Thursday Sept. 28. Photo: Angel Valentin for NPR |
With a talentless cast and a narrative unhampered by reality, the Usual Gang Of Idiots on SNL took a shot at Trump Saturday, and tried to follow the talking points that people were "dying in Puerto Rico."
Apparently they're also illiterate, because left-wing NPR reported the reality on the problem on September 28th, three days before the last SNL venom-gram aired:
Millions of people in Puerto Rico need fuel, water, food and medicine. More than a week after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, major infrastructure is still down. Stores have trouble filling their shelves. Families are running low on the supplies they stockpiled before the storm, and across the island, many residents say they haven't seen any aid deliveries.
Meanwhile, at the port in San Juan, row after row of refrigerated shipping containers sit humming. They've been there for days, goods locked away inside.
It's one thing to get supplies to Puerto Rico. But officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which administers FEMA, say moving goods around the island is the bigger challenge.
Crowley, a maritime shipping company, started unloading shipments on Saturday. By Friday, it will have received more than 4,000 loaded crates.
Most of the containers coming in have never left. Crowley says it has more than 3,400 commercial containers at its terminal now. That's just one shipping company, at one port. Several other ports are accepting shipments, and stranded crates total an estimated 10,000.
"These containers are full of food, these containers are full of water, full of medicine ... full of construction materials," says Vice President Jose Ayala, who notes a barge a day has arrived since the port opened on Saturday. "It has reached Puerto Rico. The problem is we can't get it on the shelves."
Ayala says it's frustrating: "People are out there under so much need, and there's this cargo here."
"Plenty of vessels can get cargo to the island," agrees Mark Miller, Crowley's vice president of communications. "But the real difficulty is getting the goods to the people via trucks."
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of pounds have been delivered to the airport by commercial airlines, and the Department of Defense and FEMA have also been bringing in deliveries by air. Everybody — the government, aid groups and private firms — is having trouble moving those goods around.
Hundreds of refrigerated containers here posing an extra problem. Stores without fuel for their generators can't accept goods that need to be kept cool.
The Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration tells NPR that the government is working with the truck driver's union to find a solution for driving with downed power lines and damaged roads, and the Department of Defense says it has sent teams to work on clearing blocked streets.
Not everyone believes roadways are the problem. Roberto Ramirez Kurtz is the mayor of Cabo Rojo in southwestern Puerto Rico, which is about as far away from San Juan as you can get on the island — a 2 ½ to 3-hour drive.
He says more than 5,000 homes were completely destroyed in his town, and people are running out of water and insulin. But aid and resources, "they're staying in San Juan," he says.
Kurtz was in San Juan to ask for help, and having made the trip himself, he doesn't believe that road conditions are an obstacle. "The roads are open," he says. "I've been able to come here. So why haven't we used this to [transport goods] west?"
Meanwhile Juan Carlos Garcia, the mayor of Coamo in the south of the island, says the only aid his town has received is five pallets of water. "The state never came to provide diesel to the hospital," he says. People are running low on food supplies and hysteria is growing, he says.
He, too, says the roads are clear — and that he's in San Juan to ask why no aid has reached his town.
Along with road conditions, authorities and shipping firms also say diesel shortages are to blame. Long lines for gas are persistent all over the island. Distributing fuel across Puerto Rico is FEMA's number one priority, the Department of Defense says, to help alleviate the issue.
Richard Darmanin, the vice president of Capitol Transportation Inc., says import paperwork is having to be done manually, which is also slowing down the process. And standing outside the port earlier this week, looking at the rows of containers, he said an even bigger problem is the lack of drivers.
You have a shortage of drivers who have lost a lot during the storm," he says. "You may have a huge fleet but they ain't moving themselves."
"Whatever driver shows up, we put him to work," he says.
The governor of Puerto Rico has issued an appeal for anyone with a commercial license to help distribute gas, Darmanin says.So the roads in P.R. are fine, from eyewitness reports.
There are tons of supplies (that many containers would ship 460,000 tons of goods).
But the Teamsters are on strike, no one's showing up to haul gasoline, diesel, or anything else, so everything's sitting and stacking up in the seaports and airports.
And nobody's dying in San Juan.
In fact Mayor Lyingbitch (hardcore Shrillary supporter in 2016) had time to go have a cap and T-shirt run off, which takes roads, gas, and electrical power.
That's a lot of resources to waste on a bankrupt story.
She just didn't have time to get anybody to come get the pallets of stuff sitting behind her BS press conference, and take it across the island to the smaller towns, where other people actually need help, and supplies.
But the crapola was shoveled solely to feed her bullshit narrative, one picked up and swallowed without any intervening brainpower by the ghormless gits on Saturday Night Propaganda.
Say, didn't some of those f**kers say if Trump won, they were leaving the US? I guess once you tell one fat whopping lie, the other 10,000 a week get a lot easier.
As no less than Geraldo Rivera tweeted at the Mayor of Bullshit,
"Attacking @realDonaldTrump for the ravages of nature & neglect is politicizing tragedy"
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