Photos show massive stockpile of bottled water left on a runway for more than yr - Sensationalist Headlines

http://uk.businessinsider.com/puerto-rico-water-bottle-fema-hurrican-maria-2018-9 A photographer working for a Puerto Rican police agency reportedly caught a glimpse of a stockpile of bottled water on a runaway in the city of Ceiba. The water was believed to be part of relief efforts after Hurricane Maria wrought devastation on the US territory in September 2017. The bottles were reportedly provided by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency and turned over to the central government last year, according to CBS News correspondent David Begnaud, who first reported on the revelation. A photographer claimed to have discovered a stockpile of bottled water sitting on a tarmac in Puerto Rico. A year later, the photographer said the water was still there. The Federal Emergency Management Agency reportedly told CBS News correspondent David Begnaud that it provided the water to the central government in response to Hurricane Maria in 2017, but it is unclear what kept the water from being distributed. http://static2.uk.businessinsider.com/image/5b989ab1672e164dab4497d0-960/4147589710217441246561895572323251393396736n.jpg What the fuck....

If this is the central governments fault and not the fault of a US mainland agency (which it hopefully is) Trump will have a bloody field day "If they don't use what we send, they don't need help at all!"

Probably both

Not gonna lie, I had to zoom in to understand the scale. They're pallets wrapped in plastic righr?

They seem to be the big 24 packs stacked on top of each other, wrapped in plastic.

I'm assuming that water will need to be reprocessed. I don't think water sitting in plastic exposed to sunlight and other elements will be safe to drink. What a massive waste. The mismanagement shaking my head.

Food and aid has been coming to PR no problem. It's just that nobody in PR itself has been able to actually transport the goods across the country. Reasons range from the roads being too bad to a shortage of truck drivers, but the fact remains that the US has been providing. I'm sure there are plenty of conspiracy theorists claiming that PR is intentionally withholding this shit to discredit Trump, but I doubt it. I'm fairly certain this really is a case of either incompetence or their infrastructure has been too trashed to adequately transport these goods. Didn't help when the mayor of San Juan gave that press conference about being "mad as hell" while standing in front of several pallets of food, though. That provided a lot of bait for said conspiracy theorists.

If I remember correctly, this is all useless water that is just being left as there are bigger worries. The disaster relief people simply left it out for too long because they were concerned with other matters and because plastic-bottled water and tropical weather don't go well the water (when they got around to distributing it) tasted rancid.

It's almost as if dumping a bunch of shit on the ground in one spot and expecting people picking up the pieces of a major disaster to just suddenly be able to do the rest is a bad tactic for managing disaster relief. Imagine if during Katrina FEMA just fucking dumped a bunch of cans and shit in the middle of New Orleans while it was still flooded and said, "Meh, well someone's going to figure this out eventually, we've done our part, lets gtfo, job well done boys!" Like, giving people resources is only 30% of the solution when they literally have no means of using said resources. It's like giving a homeless person enough iron ingots and raw timber to builda house and expecting them to be able to just forge their own nails and make their own planks so they won't be homeless anymore.

I always heard people say there are stockpiles of aid sitting around in PR being unused by the local government but I was always a bit skeptical since it was usually a politically charged conspiracy thing. I've been meaning to look into the Puerto Rico response now that the political bullshit has calmed down a bit. I feel like it was a mess of a response by everyone involved. But I'll have to look into it more. Having gone through large hurricanes on the gulf coast, it seems to me that the Federal government can only do so much, but it comes down to the local officials to implement it. Feds can provide funding, aid, and manpower, but if the locals are terrible at putting it to use, it's gonna be a mess. Puerto Rico also had the extra headache of being a logistical nightmare. All aid had to be flown or shipped in. Ports were ravaged by storm making unloading and shipping incredibly difficult. Infrastructure was destroyed, there was no power, making communication and movement hard. Many roads were destroyed, making even getting to places a challenge. There were so many things that went wrong that I hope we can learn from it. It was definitely much harder of a response than anything we've seen before. It should've been expected from the get go that it would be slower to get things where they needed to be just by the nature of the situation. This was always going to be a slow response. I think the Puerto Rico response will go down as a failure of teamwork and management on both the federal and local level.

bit of both, but certainly pulling FEMA out early had to have left some confusion as to where things were being delivered.

Don't forget good ol' corruption- not just of the 'politicians kowtowing to big business' variety, but the kind endemic to developing nations where nothing happens without palms getting greased. Puerto Rico is a US territory, but it has terrible problems with corruption that agencies like FEMA are wholly unused to dealing with.

The entire Puerto Rican government was literally inundated with a existential level state of emergency and you expect them to be able to transport 1000+ tons of small plastic water bottles while the public infrastructure was destroyed? The logistics were probably too hard and resources too thin.

Found the air strip on google maps. Whenever the picture was taken, it was just a bunch of cargo containers. There's a small port near by with a US Army Reserve station, where the 432nd Transportation Company is based. The 432nd Transportation Company has been providing transportation of food, water and power generators supporting Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The Army Reserve is part of a synchronized Federal emergency response system for immediate assistance. Providing timely and appropriate response to an incident remains one of the Army’s key operational concepts. https://www.dvidshub.net/image/3887009/ltg-luckey-checks-soldiers-432nd-transportation-company-ceiba-puerto-rico Found your water: https://www.alamy.com/spc-brad-feng-a-motor-transport-operator-with-the-432nd-transportation-company-based-in-roosevelt-roads-naval-station-puerto-rico-stands-by-to-secure-a-load-of-water-in-a-distribution-center-in-toa-baja-puerto-rico-to-be-distributed-to-residents-here-october-16-2017-the-mexican-government-donated-approximately-57000-gallons-of-bottled-water-to-puerto-rico-in-support-of-hurricane-maria-relief-efforts-us-army-photo-by-spc-gabrielle-weaver-image184684792.html https://www.alamy.com/us-army-reserve-soldiers-spc-jeffrey-lebron-and-sgt-sergio-alvarado-assigned-to-the-432nd-transportation-company-in-ceiba-pr-secure-pallets-of-water-that-were-transported-to-el-departamento-de-la-vivienda-in-san-juan-october-7-image184661017.html Based on the pictures, I'd say thats a couple hundred thousand bottles of Aquafina sitting out there. It's in a city and theres a military company that specializes in Transportation that was tasked with distribution. Hard to say why this is here. Looks like they had a lot more parked there and they distributed some of it. Maybe it's the Mexican aid water? Who knows.

Yeah but are they surrounded by trees or bushes? It's what makes the scale look so off.

I just watched the Explained episode on water consumption and this has now upset me.

It's a runway so it'd have to be bushes. Trees pose a safety issue.

no it probably was the democrats https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1040217897703026689 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1040220855400386560

Nothing makes sense anymore.

If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. That's literally the fucking point of a comparative mortality count, you shitstain. If the amount of people dying in a 6 month period jumps TWENTY TWO PERCENT compared to the previous year with no hurricane, then YES, there were likely a lot of deaths directly caused by the aftermath of the fucking thing! Just because people didn't die DURING the hurricane doesn't mean people weren't displaced, made homeless, starved, or died of exhaustion or dehydration as a result of it. I'm sick of this piece of shit slack-jawed uneducated pile of orange peels pouring out this constant bullshit rhetoric