From PavewayIV at Moon of Alabama:

Commercial jet pilots are perfectly capable of landing/taking off passenger jets without navigation aids. The runway is clear. Why no passenger service for over a week? The rich are able to come and go as they please on their private jets…

Over half of the water supply disappears to leakage or theft. The utility’s bonds are rated ‘junk’ and nobody will buy any new bonds they issue. In other words, they have NO money to fix anything and can’t borrow more from anyone…

The government itself is broke. They were liquidating state pension funds at the rate of $1 billion/yr for years to pay government pensions – that’s after spending all the contributions of current government workers…

The well-censored news is that PR is starting to turn into a Mad Max post-Apocalyptic hell-hole. This is Christmas for the many small criminal gangs there and the police are mostly useless against them (even if you could call them)…

You can’t possibly ship enough bottled water for 3.5 million people and damn sure are not going to get enough of it where it’s needed most…

FEMA can’t unload aid because the ports are filled with shipping containers of stuff that retailer’s either can’t (no drivers or trucks) or will not (store closed) pick up. If they hauled every container out to sea and dumped them, the port would STILL be unable to handle the food and water needed for 3.4 million people – it’s just not physically possible…

And all this is happening when the US has 40 thousand of its soldiers in Germany protecting us from Russia, and 35 thousand in Japan protecting us from the red menace – China! Or North Korea – I forget. We just shipped an entire armored brigade to Poland from Kansas. The US government is claiming 4,500 US military are now supporting the PR relief effort, but hide the fact that 3,000 of them are PR National Guard stationed there and either didn’t show up for work, or have no fuel/trucks/equipment to do much of anything. We are sending down a three-star general to handle the effort (and take the blame). That poor guy’s career is officially over…

One of the first flights in on the 22nd was an American Airlines flight carrying Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) officers – among others – to help manually screen passengers and luggage at the airport. The x-ray snooper and metal detectors were not working. Because the most important thing to the US government in an extraordinary natural disaster is the possibility of shoe bombers or drug smuggling. The manual screening was, in part, used as an excuse by airlines to restrict or cancel their flights this week.

Flights to the US mainland are domestic flights – so there are no customs concerns at either end. The only other ‘problem’ the airlines cited was their inability to print government-mandated boarding passes at San Juan. Think about that for a moment.

One of the most important efforts in disaster relief is to get people out of the area that don’t need to be there. FEMA should have chartered commercial airlines to evacuate people from Puerto Rico to the US *for free*. FEMA’s annual budget is $14 billion – if they couldn’t find the money, then people in the US would probably have donated enough to charter flights. Pointless when the airlines are unwilling to operate in an emergency without printing tickets, manifests and boarding passes. Instead, thousands of passengers got four nights of rest on the floor in an un-airconditioned, very humid airport. *Only* four days for the first ones lucky enough to be on the first flight out. Six days for others. Do you usually carry enough cash to feed you and your family for six days at an airport? How about six days of diapers for your infant child? Passengers waiting in the San Juan terminal were told NOTHING during that time except there were no flights out and they better wait at the terminal until one was available (or risk losing it).

FEMA could have sent military transports there to pick up people on Friday – they all have those web seats stowed away somewhere. Instead, the military ferried in cargo and left mostly empty*. Genius. Can’t be cutting in to the airline’s cash cow. Besides, how could the USAF protect itself from shoe-bombers?

*They really didn’t leave empty. Government elite got a lift out, but the military didn’t want the people sleeping on the floor of the airport to know that. You know – riots and all…

[T]he federal government is holding off on infrastructure repairs especially to the power grid until the PR administration agrees to privatise it, something the population is completely opposed to so now they are gonna be blackmailed into it…

For years various DC lobbyists have been leaning on the Hill to ensure that PR’s utilities are underfunded and don’t receive any assistance to upgrade so that left the local powerless government no choice but to deal with the enemy…

On a more positive note, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines cancelled a scheduled cruise departing this weekend from San Juan and instead sent the empty 3800 passenger, fully-staffed ship filled with humanitarian aid to Puerto Rico on Wednesday. It picked up around 1,700 ‘evacuees’ and has continued on to the Virgin Islands to deliver more aid and evacuate another 1,700 before returning to Ft. Lauderdale this Tuesday.