FEMA evicting Puerto Ricans from ‘temporary’ housing where they’ve lived since Hurricane Maria

Just as Hurricane Florence created a new emergency along the East Coast, federal workers were due to begin evicting victims of the storm that ravaged Puerto Rico a year ago from the hotel rooms they’ve been calling home.

Federal Emergency Management Agency workers were due to evict 987 families from their extended stay lodgings on Friday, according to NBC News, displacing scores of women and children that have no where else to live.

Lenisha Smith, a FEMA spokeswoman told NBC, ‘The hurricane was almost a year ago. This is not a long-term program, it’s supposed to be temporary.’ 

Just as Hurricane Florence created a new emergency along the East Coast, federal workers were due to begin evicting victims of the storm that ravaged Puerto Rico a year ago from the hotel rooms they’ve been calling home

Federal Emergency Management Agency workers were due to evict 987 families from their extended stay lodgings on Friday, displacing Puerto Ricans like Jose Santiago (pictured) who will have no other place to live

Maria hit Puerto Rico a year ago next week on Sept. 20, 2017. Families have continued to struggle with power outages and clean water supply since

In this Oct. 5, 2017 file photo, Roberto Figueroa Caballero sits in his home destroyed by Hurricane Maria, two weeks after the storm hit La Perla neighborhood on the coast of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Roughly 8,000 families remain without reliable water service as of last month

Maria hit Puerto Rico a year ago next week on Sept. 20, 2017. Families have continued to struggle with power outages and clean water supply since. 

Roughly 8,000 families remain without reliable water service, explained a report this week in The Washington Post.

Many families relocated to the mainland after the storm destroyed their homes, with some 130,000 people leaving the island. 

FEMA is offering some of those families rental assistance if they return to Puerto Rico in lieu of paying for their expensive American hotel rooms. 

Every family was offered a one-way plane ticket back to Puerto Rico, where they have access to further government services. But the ticket offer expires on Friday, NBC reported.

Some families have found themselves homeless as a result, the report found, or in a mad dash to find new lodging before they check themselves into a shelter.

The pre-determined deadline had the unfortunate timing of coinciding another storm on the East Coast – Hurricane Florence – and a claim from President Trump that Democrats inflated the death toll in Puerto Rico to embarrass his administration.

Trump’s assertion, which did not align with the facts, had Republicans from Florida, including gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, distancing themselves from the president.

The president gave his administration an A+ for its relief efforts and called it an ‘unsung success.’ He said that he’d put billions toward the effort to rebuild Puerto Rico, which is an American territory but not a state.

‘If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list,’ he said of the 3,000 residents whose cause of death was tied to Maria. ‘Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico,’ he tweeted.

Trump refused to back down from the claim and received back up on Thursday evening from Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who said that a widely-cited study published by George Washington University that served as the basis for for claims that 3,000 had perished dealt with estimates and likely included an inaccurate death toll.

Dobbs pointed to the study that was commissioned by the Puerto Rican government on Thursday and said: ‘The president, by the way, is right…The numbers were inflated and the president was right to call out the organizations who threw out science, statistics, and evidence to discredit the Trump administration.’

Trump is standing by claim that Puerto Rico’s 3,000 death toll number is inflated and retweeted a segment by Fox News’ Lou Dobbs backing his statement on Thursday 

In his segment, Dobbs said: ‘The numbers were inflated and the president was right to call out the organizations who threw out science, statistics, and evidence to discredit the Trump administration’

Early Thursday Trump vented on Twitter that the 3,000 was inflated and exaggerated

He claimed the exaggeration was engineered by Democrats to portray the president in a bad light following Hurricane Maria and Irma

‘The finding wasn’t a result of a death toll count, a body count, nor a study of death certificates, but a public health study that subtracted the number of people who theoretically should have died over the same period from the number of people who were reported dead over that period,’ Dobbs stated.

He said that following the Milken Institute report, Puerto Rico’s governor amended the number of dead from a prior count of 64 to 3,000.

Lynn Goldman, the dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health, shared the study’s results to CNN last month but said more work was needed for an accurate estimate.

While the number may not be as high as 3,000, the Puerto Rican government has submitted that the official toll was higher than the December 2017 tally of 64.

In an August document it said 1,427 more deaths than normal occurred over the past four months after Hurricane Maria and Irma, compared to death tolls over the previous four years.

On Thursday morning the president exploded on Twitter, saying the reported 3,000 Puerto Rican hurricane deaths was inflated and exaggerated.

‘3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,’ Trump tweeted. 

President Donald Trump now says the accepted death toll from hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico in 2017 is inflated – and claims Democrats are leveraging the number ‘to make me look bad’

Puerto Ricans were left to dig themselves out of debris in the wake of Hurricane Maria last year in dangerous conditions after losing power, running water and cell phone service

‘When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000.’

Trump said, ‘This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.’

After Trump came under scrutiny for the comments that were perceived as insensitive to victims of the storm, the White House said that the president was responding to media coverage of the storm.

‘As the President said, every death from Hurricane Maria is a horror. Before, during, and after the two massive hurricanes, the President directed the entire Administration to provide unprecedented support to Puerto Rico,’ White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said.

Gidley added: ‘President Trump was responding to the liberal media and the San Juan Mayor who sadly, have tried to exploit the devastation by pushing out a constant stream of misinformation and false accusations.’

The Milken study compared mortality in the six months following the storm with the number of deaths that would have been expected if it had not hit the island. 

‘The difference between those two numbers is the estimate of excess mortality due to the hurricane,’ the scientists wrote. 

The risk of dying during the storm or in its aftermath was 60 percent higher for Puerto Ricans living in the poorest areas, they found. 

House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters late Thursday morning that he has ‘no reason to dispute these numbers.’

But Ryan also denied that a death toll in the thousands reflects poorly on Trump, saying, ‘casualties don’t make a person look bad.’ 

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, a Democrat who tangled with the president over and over while Hurricane Maria made international news, also fired back on Thursday.

Dobbs said George Washington University study did not cite a death toll count, a body count, nor a study of death certificates, the damage of Catani, Puerto Rico pictured above

A shelter is pictured prior to the arrival of Hurricane Maria. An approximate death toll following the hurricane is yet to be made, as the George Washington study was actually an estimate of ‘excess deaths’

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz tweeted that Trump is ‘delusional, paranoid, and unhinged from any sense of reality’ on Thursday

‘This is what denial following neglect looks like: Mr Pres in the real world people died on your watch. YOUR LACK OF RESPECT IS APPALLING!’ she tweeted.

‘Mr Trump you can try and bully us with your tweets BUT WE KNOW OUR LIVES MATTER. You will never take away our self respect. Shame on you!’

Yulín Cruz later called Trump ‘delusional, paranoid, and unhinged from any sense of reality.’ 

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said Thursday that his government commissioned the George Washington University study. ‘We are confident in that estimate,’ he told CBS News. 

‘There are still over 45,000 folks without roofs, still a weak energy grid,’ he said of the U.S. territory in the Caribbean Sea. ‘If we get another devastation, it is likely to collapse.’ 

Mayor Yulín Cruz of San Juan, Puerto Rico lashed out at Trump on Thursday, calling him delusional and detached from reality

FEMA administrator Brock Long said Wednesday on MSNBC that ‘indirect deaths’ are often more numerous than deaths caused immediately by a natural disaster.

‘You have people who died after the storm passed because they fell off their roof making repairs, they died in car crashes because the stoplights were off, you have chainsaw accidents, you have accidents with people cleaning up debris,’ he said.

A team of researchers at Harvard University announced in May that they believed Hurricane Maria’s death toll was 4,600. At the time, the government’s death toll stood at 64.

Trump said Wednesday that his administration is prepared for Hurricane Florence, a storm tearing up the Carolina coastline, and insisted that his administration’s widely panned response to the devastation in Puerto Rico last year was an ‘unappreciated great job.’

‘We got A pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan),’ Trump tweeted.

In the Oval Office on Tuesday, the president praised his administration’s response to the series of storms in 2017. ‘I think Puerto Rico was an incredible, unsung success,’ he claimed.  

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