Massive stockpile of bottled water found in Puerto Rico a year after Maria

NationalTitles18

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All fine and dandy, techster, but what is the official death toll from the government down there now? Nearly 3,000 or no?

Also, the situation was crappy before Trump ever entered office. This is less an absolution of Trump than a commentary on the poor management done by the government from federal to local.
 

NationalTitles18

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Yeah, it's the New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/us/politics/trump-denies-puerto-rico-death-roll.html

His claim on the death toll came in a pair of morning tweets. “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” he said. Mr. Trump said the toll in Puerto Rico was only six to 18 dead after his visit there following the storm and that “as time went by it did not go up by much.” Democrats, he said, had padded the death toll by including, for example, a person who died of old age.[FONT=&quot]The death toll in Puerto Rico has changed since Mr. Trump’s visit to the island last year. Fatalities were officially recorded as 64 for nearly a year, despite convincing evidence that the figure was too low because death certificates had failed to take into account the long-range impact of the storm. The National Hurricane Center, a federal agency, called the death toll “highly uncertain” in an April report.
In August, a review by researchers from George Washington University at the request of the Puerto Rican government compared death rates during the storm and its aftermath to normal rates and concluded that 2,975 more people died than would have otherwise. While this was a scientific extrapolation rather than a list of specific names with specific causes, the Puerto Rican government accepted the estimate, as did lawmakers from both parties.
Puerto Rico’s leadership took issue with Mr. Trump’s dismissal of that number, as did several leading Florida Republicans, including Gov. Rick Scott and Senator Marco Rubio.

“We strongly denounce anyone who would use this disaster or question our suffering for political purposes,” Gov. Ricardo A. Roselló of Puerto Rico said. “I ask the president to recognize the magnitude of Hurricane Maria and continue working with my government to ensure a full recovery of the American citizens of Puerto Rico.”
Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a retiring Miami Republican, said that no one should distort the truth of what happened in Puerto Rico. “It might be a new low,” Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said of the president’s false claim, adding that only a “warped mind that would turn this statistic into fake news” about himself.
Mr. Bossert said that attributing thousands of deaths in Puerto Rico purely to the storm was a tricky business, a view privately held by many still serving in the Trump administration.

[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]“The people that died — thousands of people — it’s terrible, but it’s always difficult to talk about the causality of that death,” Mr. Bossert said. He argued that the link between some of the fatalities reported and the storm might have been “correlative, and not necessarily causal,” such as the case of a person with a heart condition who died months later because of lack of sufficient access to clean water, electricity or medical care.
In some parts of Florida where highly contested midterm elections are just weeks away, the politics of Maria were hard to avoid. Since the storm, many Puerto Ricans have relocated to Florida and are eligible to vote, making support from the Puerto Rican diaspora even more critical.

[/FONT]

Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Republican from South Florida, said he did not understand why Mr. Trump would inaccurately state the death toll. “We should all be focused on what is about to happen in the Carolinas,” he said, “and not politicize hurricanes and hurricane relief.”
 

techster79

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All fine and dandy, techster, but what is the official death toll from the government down there now? Nearly 3,000 or no?

Also, the situation was crappy before Trump ever entered office. This is less an absolution of Trump than a commentary on the poor management done by the government from federal to local.
It seems they are all estimates. I’d like to not be cynical and think the local authorities sat on their hands and whined for political purposes but I don’t know.

Now you’re starting to get it. The government is a necessary evil. It should be as limited in scope and power as much as possible.
 

NationalTitles18

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It seems they are all estimates. I’d like to not be cynical and think the local authorities sat on their hands and whined for political purposes but I don’t know.

Now you’re starting to get it. The government is a necessary evil. It should be as limited in scope and power as much as possible.
You imply there was a time recently when I didn't "get it". I don't know what ever gave you that idea.
 

twofbyc

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Trump is not far right. Not sure why you think that, unless fake news. He actually leans slightly left on Social issues. Always has.
Alright, post the Social issues on which Trump is even slightly left of center.
Abortion?
Environment?
Raising the minimum wage?
Affordable heath insurance for everybody?



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

chanson78

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It is also a rather useless way of comparing death tolls, because in order to evaluate the relative scale of Hurricane Maria, the same method would have to be used to measure other natural disasters, likely increasing their estimated death tolls as well.
The media reported the new estimate as if it were an actual confirmed death toll — with CNN taking care to note that the new number was released near the anniversary of Katrina. The Puerto Rican governor, under heavy political pressure due to the slow pace of the island’s recovery, officially revised the death toll to match the estimate.
That gave the media an excuse to throw out science and statistics, and to report the 2.975 number as an established fact — even though it was just an estimate based on a statistical model, and three times higher than all but one of the previous estimates.
The AP reported earlier this week that “3,000 people died in Puerto Rico” in Hurricane Maria — as if it were a proven fact. It did not indicate that the number was simply one estimate among many, and that its evidence was a controversial statistical model.
On Thursday, the AP — with a touch of chutzpah — accused the president of stating “without evidence” that the “Puerto Rico hurricane death count is [a] plot by Democrats to make him look bad.”
Great post thanks for taking the time to put together a well reasoned post. There is a lot to unpack and instead of quoting everything I’m going to just quote the specifics I’m responding to.

For reference, what would you say is the actual death toll from Katrina? Searching google for “death toll Katrina” has 1833 as the first result. CNN utilizes numbers from this study: Hurricane Katrina deaths, Louisiana, 2005. Which puts the deaths at 986 total. The neat thing about this study is that it used the same methdology as GWU study recently released about Puerto Rico and Maria. A study was performed after hurricane Sandy. A link is here. To be fair, I’ll admit, that sandy, which I picked because it was one of the few major hurricanes during the Obama administration, does not use the same methodology to assess death tolls that were used in the studies on Katrina and Maria. It’s interesting, but I’m not sure conspiracy worthy, due primarily to the location and data available for all three locations.

From your post it seems you that your biggest beef was that the 3000 number was not adequately presented with caveats to allow for people to realize that this number has changed from the initial and subsequent estimates. A quick search of results for the recent reporting, CNN, WashingtonPost, WSJ, USAToday, all mention the report, often including the methdology, as well as the fact that it varies widely from the original estimates presented immediately after the impact.

Where you see Democratic and media directed effort to make the President look bad, I see media companies reporting a study that used the same methodology used to determine overall death toll for Katrina at the time of the reports release. Studies into the death toll related to storms take time to compile. I’m not sure that the timing of the report is as conspiracy based as it is spurred by the current events. There is a current massive hurricane bearing down on the US. The president essentially said that a report by a well known college is fake and out to get him.

I think in the end, like most of the controversies around Trump, he has made this way worse, and stretched out coverage and brought a spotlight to the issue because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
 

willie52

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A friend of mine and his two sons all work for construction companies in Guntersville/Huntsville who flew down there to help drive heavy equipment they were going to use to repair the electrical grid. They spent 4 months down there sitting at their hotel because the PR government would not clear their trucks so they could unload them from the ships and start working. They eventually tired of just sitting around so they flew back at their own expense and refuse to go back.
 

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