Presenter: C. William Booher, FEMA Public Affairs Director; John Rabin, FEMA Acting Regional Administrator; Alejandro De La Campa, FEMA Federal Coordinating Officer; Rear Admiral Jeffrey Hughes; Brigadier General Richard Kim; Jeff Byard, Associate Administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery
September 28, 2017
FEMA Briefing
OPERATOR: Good day, and welcome to the FEMA press call on Hurricane Maria recovery. Today's conference is being recorded.
At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Will Booher, FEMA public affairs director. Please go ahead.
MR. C. WILLIAM BOOHER: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. My name is William Booher; I'm the director of public affairs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Today, we're going to provide an on-the-record operational update on federal support to the response effort in Puerto Rico. On the call today, we have Regional Administrator John Rabin, Federal Coordinating Officer Alex De La Campa, Rear Admiral Jeff Hughes, Brigadier General Rich Kim.
They will provide some brief opening remarks, and then we'll open it up for your questions. When we open it up for questions, I'd ask that you state your name and organization before asking that question.
And at this time, I'll turn the call over to Regional Administrator John Rabin.
MR. JOHN RABIN: Great. Good afternoon from Puerto Rico.
As Will said, my name's John Rabin. I'm the acting regional administrator in FEMA Region II. FEMA Region II is responsible for New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Here in Puerto Rico, we have been -- we've been working in support of the governor of Puerto Rico, and in support of the Puerto Rico government, since really before Hurricane Irma started. And I think it's worth knowing there's a couple of other points to make in this.
Region II has -- Region II has a Caribbean Area Division down here that has 43 folks that work here in Puerto Rico, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They're responsible for preparedness, response planning, recovery -- all of the work that FEMA does throughout the nation, we do it here in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, using our Caribbean Area Division staff down here.
So our folks are fully embedded with the governor and fully embedded with the governor's staff to ensure that the objectives and the priorities of the governor are the ones that we view, as well.
Hurricane Maria was, and I will not mince words -- was a catastrophic storm in Puerto Rico. The damage is significant. It's terrible, and the impact on the citizens of the United States who live here has been tremendous.
The challenge in addition to having this storm, what is especially difficult and complex here is the fact that we have to support 3.5 million people on an island.
Our initial efforts over the past -- really, since the storm passed was to reestablish the sea lines of communication and the airfield lines of communication to ensure that we had the ability to bring in the commodities, the resources and the support necessary in order to help the folks here in Puerto Rico.
That meant reestablishing -- clearing ports and reestablishing a sea line of communication to get ships and ports and barges into Puerto Rico. We needed to clear airports and open airports to ensure that both of those -- both of those modes of transportation could be delivered -- could deliver resources safely and effectively.
And, in addition to that, we had to also work very closely with our colleagues in Puerto Rico to almost reestablish a local distribution network of commodities and resources.
Communications throughout the island has been significantly degraded. There are many parts of this island that still don't have good communications. The critical infrastructure, from the roads, to the water systems, to the electrical distribution and generation systems, are nonfunctioning.
So we've had to, oftentimes, reach out to folks through the distribution system; through driving through the woods; cutting paths to get to municipalities; reaching out to mayors through satellite phones; dropping urban search and rescue folks in helicopters; using our partners in the Marine Corps and the services and the Puerto Rico National Guard to cut trees down, to drive four-wheel-drive vehicles and [High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle] and military vehicles up to reach all aspects of Puerto Rico.
We have reached out to all 78 municipalities. We have -- we have provided food and water and commodities to each one of those. But that is just the beginning of the challenge. We now have to -- we now have to continue to resupply and reestablish those communications. We need to continue to resupply, with our Puerto Rican partners, the system to drive commodities and share them throughout Puerto Rico.
So a couple of things that I wanted to add before I turn it over for a more tactical update from the federal coordinating officer: We have -- we have some pretty great relationships down here with our Department of Defense [DOD] partners.
We've got -- the Navy has been here with us, the Army has been here with us, really, since prior to Irma, but definitely throughout Maria, as well.
We've got the Coast Guard, we've got the Army Reserve, and all of us are working very, very closely with the Puerto Rico National Guard to ensure that we are providing them the support they need to -- and really building that partnership to ensure that the governor is -- we are helping to meet the governor's priorities.
Through the structure of the National Response Framework, our partners in [Department of Defense] at all levels, from the Reserve to the active component, are all supporting FEMA as we coordinate the effort of the entire federal -- the federal family -- the rest of the federal government to really help achieve what we need to achieve down here, which is, you know, saving lives, sustaining lives and protecting lives.
So just a couple of quick examples of some of the things that have been done here over the past -- really, you know, probably the past week or so, using our Title 10 forces in coordination with Puerto Rico's government and in cooperation with and coordination with -- collaboration with the Puerto Rico National Guard, we have done some joint work to clear roads.
We've delivered commodities. We've delivered commodities. We've also set up the -- a distribution center. We're creating teams to go out there and clear hospitals.
Some of our best and most effective uses have been using, to date, our amphibious readiness group, which includes the USS Oak Hill, as well as -- as well as the Kearsarge and the Marine Corps U that is attached to those units.
They have been great, great partners in doing some incredibly good work to start getting the response and the recovery moving in the direction that's going to provide those life-sustaining and life-saving capabilities to our -- to our citizens here in Puerto Rico.
So the last thing I'll say before I turn it over to Alex is this has been catastrophic. I don't want to mince words for this. You've all seen the pictures. You've all -- a lot of us have friends that live in Puerto Rico and colleagues that live in Puerto Rico.
This has been a catastrophic event, and today is going to be a very difficult and hard day for our fellow citizens of Puerto Rico. Hopefully today will be a little bit better than yesterday was, and our hope is that tomorrow will be a bit better, as well.
So, with that, to give you a little bit more of a tactical update, I'm going to pass over to Alex De La Campa, who's our federal coordinating officer.
DE LA CAMPA: Hi, good morning. Thank you, John.
And, based on the introduction provided by John, I'll be more tactical. So now, the priorities are commodity delivery; fuel delivery and security to gas stations and large chains of supermarkets; diesel delivery to hospitals; hospital assessments; power restoration; and telecommunications restoration.
And I will touch base in each one of the areas that I just mentioned, and -- about our priorities.
Commodity deliver -- we've received, yesterday, 450,000 bottles of water and 260 meals, and in the next two days, we're going to receive 2.4 meals and 1.7 bottles of water.
Related to the distribution of those commodities, we started a few days ago going municipality by municipality. But we have been able to establish a distribution plan that was in place prior to the storm, where we have identified 11 regional staging areas, and we're taking from the Incident Support Base [ISB] into the support base, to all of those regional staging areas, water, food and other commodities.
And we have coordinated already with the 78 mayors in Puerto Rico, where they will be going on a daily basis, or every time that they need, so they can pick up with their own trucks and their own equipment the water and the food that they need.
So that's in place, and we're getting the support from the State Guard, the National Guard and many other entities among the federal agencies and commonwealth agencies.
Related to fuel delivery and security, a plan was developed especially to provide security. A task force was created with federal agencies, commonwealth policemen and other law enforcement official in Puerto Rico, because that was one of the concerns -- that the gas stations and the large chains of supermarkets -- and just to give you an example of how this has been improved, three days ago, there were only, like, 300 gas stations open.
So today, we have 600 -- 676 gas stations are opening this morning. So we're starting to see the improvement. Also the large chains of supermarkets are starting, also, to open now that they are receiving fuel. The Costcos, the Walmarts and all the local big supermarket chains are starting to receive diesel, so they're open and trying to go back to normality.
The third topic I'll talk -- diesel delivery to hospitals has been a main priority, especially for the medical center and all the big hospitals around the island. Fortunately, the medical center in the metropolitan area has electricity since yesterday, so those are good news.
But we have a plan of action where we have, per day, the hospitals that we will be refueling on a regular basis, and then we have a plan for the next four or five days.
Hospital assessment is also part of what we're doing, because many of them were heavily damaged or affected. So we have teams from Human and Health Services [HHS] and local officials that are conducting -- and DOD -- especially DOD -- that are supporting and overseeing the inspections of those hospitals to see when can we open them and provide support to the government of Puerto Rico.
Related to power restoration, we have a combination of the local electric and power authority, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- DOD is also supporting us -- and some electrical crews that are coming from the mainland -- New York, New Jersey and other locations that will be providing support to the Puerto Rico Electric and Power Authority.
You all probably know, after the storm, we have zero customers with power, and we're still working on that with the support of all the federal agencies, including DOD.
Telecommunication restoration -- same thing, providing support to the private entities to see how soon can we restore. And so today was only like 25 percent of the telecommunications restored. So they're working, also, hard in the restoration of their area.
In terms of -- we have released -- we have released 1.8 million liters of water and 682,000 meals to the municipalities, to the transportation we provided to the municipalities. All that has been transported to the regional staging areas and -- where the mayors and the local officials are going to pick up the deliveries.
We have a couple situations related to municipalities where, due to the large population that they have, we are assigning liaisons from FEMA to work with the mayors. And we started with the municipality of San Juan, and also with the municipality of Ponce. Those are the two largest municipalities in Puerto Rico, one in the north, one in the south.
All airports are open, and we're moving our operations to Ceiba airport from Rosie road to establish our incident support base. The ports of San Juan, Mayaguez, Ponce are open at this time. We have no official date for the opening of the schools and even for public service. Only essential entities are reporting to work.
Related to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, we have assigned missions for blue roofing, installation of generators and debris removal operations. We have conducted several meetings with mayors, and they have been very beneficial.
As John indicated earlier, due to the lack of communications, we are not able to communicate via phone with many of the municipalities. So the mayors and their staff are coming on a regular basis to Joint Force Operations [JFO], and we're able to provide them with all the support and assistance that they need. So they make sure that, when they go back, they know when they're going to receive the water, the food, when communications will be restored, blue roofing missions or debris removal missions -- and they are aware of that.
The PREPA -- PREPA is the Puerto Rico Electric and Power Authority -- director indicated this morning during a meeting with the governor that electricity will return today to the airport, the international airport; to the Condado area, and Ocean Park. All those areas are in the metropolitan area of San Juan. Also will return to Mayaguez -- that's in the west part of the island, where we have the second largest medical center in Puerto Rico.