Almost a month ago, President Trump gave his team a perfect "10" for how it handled Puerto Rico's hurricane damage. Cut to today and the hard work is far from over.
After weeks of effort, many areas were finally seeing electrical restoration following the Hurricane Maria blackout. However, late this week a power transmission line failed, leaving thousands of people without power, NBC News reports.
The damaged line ran from Arecibo to Manatí, and mostly affected the San Juan metropolitan area. Due to the line's failure, the percent of the island with power dropped from 43.2 percent to just 18 percent.
The line was worked on by Whitefish Energy, the small Montana firm that mysteriously won a no-bid $300 million contract to fix Puerto Rico's power. Whitefish was fired by the island amidst questions over how a company of its size was hired; the company says this week's outage was not its fault.
"None of the issues reported today with the outage have anything to do with the repairs Whitefish Energy performed," a company spokesperson said.
Restoration should take about 12 to 18 hours.
Overall, Puerto Rico is getting used to a very unfortunate and tragic "new normal."
However, soon residents will have to adjust to a new new normal, one without help from federal troops.
The withdrawal of emergency federal Army troops has begun, according to NPR. Over 15,000 federal troops were sent to Puerto Rico shortly after the hurricane; now 11,000 remain. The number is expected to drop even further to 5,500.
The Army says that Puerto Ricans will be fine, as they will still have the territory's National Guardsman.
"It's not a withdrawal, it's a transition," military relief effort leader Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan firmly noted. "We're transitioning more from the federal side of the military more to the state side of the military."
Some Puerto Ricans think the transition might be happening a little too soon.
"I see a lot of helicopters bringing stuff," Chaylin Palma, a resident of Morovis said.
Despite seeing all the hardware, she says she hasn't seen a whole lot of aid. "Where is all the stuff that's going into city hall?" she asked.
Palma is one of an estimated 3,000 people still living in shelters.
FEMA has announced they will be providing a new service aimed at helping those people, CBS News reports.
The organization said that it plans to give Puerto Ricans the option of temporarily relocating to the continental U.S. Preference for slots in the program will be given to those living in shelters.
Citizens taking FEMA up on the offer would be moved to either New York or Florida, both states with large Puerto Rican populations.
There hasn't been much interest in the program so far, however.
FEMA staff interviewed about 300 eligible families, and only about 30 showed interest in making the move. "So far, we've seen a very low level of interest to take advantage of that program," Mike Byrne, a FEMA official, said. "Right now, just hundreds of people really — maybe even as low as dozens. We're not seeing a great degree of interest."
This is likely due to the hesitancy of uprooting to a place that is unfamiliar.
"People really don't want to leave their homes," Byrne added. "We want to give them every opportunity we can to be able to stay here, whether it's providing financial assistance or repairing their homes. So we are going to work hard on those things so people don't have to leave."
