Show Notes:
* Michael share an update from Puerto Rico – 0:14
* Tremendous support is received from a lot organizations – 06:01
Please visit the following links if you would like to donate to the Hurricane Relief in Puerto Rico
Red Lightning
Clean Water For Puerto Rico
Hey, everybody. Michael here. It is October 11th, 2017, and I’m recording this from Caguas, Puerto Rico. I’ve been here for just over a week now and I’ve been working with the Salvation Army and I wanted to give you guys an update in terms of what I’m doing, what the real situation is on the grounds and the problems we’re facing and as well as what you can do to help.
Puerto Rico, the problem with it … Whatever you’re hearing in the news, it’s not one thing, it is a number of things. If you look at the system of society, including water and power and internet connection, cell service, fuel, distribution of food, all of those things, they come into play as a system. So when all of the systems in a complex organization start to lose efficiency, it has a multiplying factor on it, and I’ll try to illustrate this right now.
If you’re not able to call to a friend or a coworker and communicate an idea to them, when that is gone, it creates a logistical nightmare because in order to get certain types of information, you have to physically show up. Puerto Rico is unique because it is an island and it’s geographically isolated, so there’s not roads coming in. If you are going to come to Puerto Rico, you’re coming by boat, or you’re coming by air, and that creates a tremendous bottleneck for supplies first off. The second problem is that the damage to the infrastructure is wide spread, so if one town or two towns were hit on Puerto Rico, the rest of the island can obviously come in and support it, that’s not what we’re seeing here. We’re seeing widespread destruction across the entire island. 88% power is still down, so the island is running off 12% of the power that it typically normally has, so without power we lose lots of different services, desalinization plants, water plants, things of that nature, and that creates some tremendous challenges. As I mentioned, the power grid is down. Without power, it’s a real nightmare. In Saint Thomas we didn’t have power for a while. Most everything that I see here is running on generators, but there is some city power coming back on.
But really the biggest problem in the beginning was the lack of fuel that has kind of been resolved and people are able to travel more, the gas lines are definitely shorter, in fact yesterday I filled up, I didn’t wait at all, but I think the fuel was the first thing that needed to be resolved. The second thing now, the biggest thing, is communications. If AT&T and the other cell service providers could fix that, that would be a great benefit. Even our sat phones that we’re using here, sometimes they don’t get through because there’s so many people using sat phones, but currently the communications is one of the biggest challenges, I think.
Despite what you guys are hearing in the news, I can tell you there are thousands of government and [inaudible 00:03:04] workers, nonprofit organizations, state departments working together. They are doing a phenomenal job, very impressive, but as a whole, I see Puerto Rico as a problem that’s just not going to be solved at any point. You’re just not going to say, “Okay, the problem in Puerto Rico is finished.” That’s not how it’s going to work. What’s happening is the situation is being improved upon from day-to-day, and that is what’s getting the progress d...