So.\n
It's 6:30pm in the most densely populated neighborhood in San Juan and it's pitch dark. For the 104th day in a row. pic.twitter.com\/9CQTw6YUsg<\/a><\/p>— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 2, 2018<\/a><\/blockquote>\n\n
Now I don’t know if that black rectangle is, as my Junior Senator implies, a photograph of downtown San Juan at half-past-six in the evening, or whether he simply attached a black box to his tweet to make the point. Whether the image is real or not, the point is: most people in the US territory of Puerto Rico have no electric power or no running water or no transportation or no place of business or no government services, three months and more after the storm hit. We haven’t rebuilt, and what plans there are to rebuild seem to be haphazard and lack urgency. There’s a national shortage of IV bags, which are a main product of Puerto Rico; there doesn’t seem to be any likelihood that production will return to former levels any time soon. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much likelihood that anything on the island will return to former levels any time soon. We have, nationally, pretty much just written it off—not the entire territory and its entire populace, but the notion that we could and will rebuild. Even Senator Murphy’s longer piece about his visit<\/a> is infused with a kind of defeatism, in my reading.\n
Five years ago, we had a massive storm in my affluent suburb that knocked out power to more than half the town for a week. A week! It was awful. We made a few changes, trimmed a few trees that were hanging over the power lines. We didn’t make structural changes, didn’t do anything, as far as I know, that would make it less likely for the power to be disrupted or would make it quicker to reconnect houses that were cut off. We haven’t had unseasonable storms like that recently, which has been nice.\n