this summer to announce a multimillion dollar fund to boost the arts. you just heard in that story a man still doesn t have his power back. who or what is to blame? it s an island with a $72 billion debt before maria hit puerto rico. it s no response from fema and the government. fighting with nfl football players over kneeling. it s many, many, many are responsible. what we also need to add is that there may be people who have no power, but the power, even though it has been restored, the fact is that many times during the week, power fails. so families cannot go to the supermarket and buy an entire week worth of groceries because they never know for 24 hours they re not going to have power.
this storm hits. but, wolf, that comes just hours after the president this morning rejected the idea that 3,000 people died after the last big storm hit puerto rico. president trump in the middle of a manmade disaster tonight after falsely claiming 3,000 people didn t die when hurricane irma devastated puerto rico last year. trump tweeting today that there were less than two dozen deaths when he visited the island a year ago, accusing democrats of padding the death toll in order to make me look as bad as possible. puerto rico increased the official death toll last month after george washington university published a 69-page study estimating nearly 3,000 people died in the six months after maria hit. trump offering no reason to doubt that study today and providing no evidence for his claim that democrats were to blame as the white house
received a decision yet almost a year after maria hit the island. fema s funeral assistance is intended to help people who lost loved ones in disaster situation, to help them pay for funeral costs including caskets, mortuary service, burial plots, and cremations. although fema director brock long did not give a specific reason in his letter for the rejections, he pointed to fema requirements. to qualify puerto ricans had to provide a death certificate or letter from a government official. that letter clearly indicates the death was a tributed to the emergency or disaster either indirectly or directly. but getting that information was of course impossible for many families because as the puerto rican government recently admitted, officials until now weren t correctly counting hurricane-related deaths. today in the oval office, as his fema director briefed him on hurricane florence currently barreling towards the united states, president trump was asked by a reporter how he will apply th
holding the official death toll for maria at just 64, two weeks ago, following a study commissioned by the island s government, puerto rico finally raised the official death toll attributed to the storm to 2,975. that puts it almost exactly at the death toll of americans killed 17 years ago today in the attacks of 9/11. and tonight buzzfeed news reports that of more than 2,000 puerto ricans who applied to fema for funeral assistance for loved ones who died as a result of maria, fema approved just 75 of those more than 2,000 funeral assistance applications. in a letter to senator elizabeth warren, fema director brock long wrote, quote, as of july 30th, his agency had received 2,341 requests for funeral assistance for puerto ricans related to hurricane maria. fema approved just 75 of those requests, meaning 97% were either rejected or haven t
water stations at streams and springs that opened up in landslides after the storm, which led to all kinds of health problems down the line. much of the running water, houses that still had it, their water was contaminated anyway. people did what they had to do. a week after maria hit, the u.s. defense department said nearly half the population of puerto rico still didn t have drinking water. you cannot live without drinking water. there was a deadly outbreak of the bacteria leptosporosis on the island from contaminated water and soil. the outbreak alone may have been responsible for dozen of deaths. hospitals did not have enough fuel to keep their generators running. they finally dispatched a medical ship to the island, but it didn t arrive until nearly two weeks after maria hit, and it never ran at anything close to capacity. despite the need on the island, they never got people on to the ship. a week after the hurricane, thousands of containers of