Puerto Rican officials scramble to contain fallout from missing aid scandal
Puerto Rican officials continued to distance themselves from a growing scandal involving tons of emergency supplies that were never distributed in the wake of a powerful series of earthquakes.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, government officials said they had been blindsided by the revelation on Saturday that there was a warehouse packed with aid in the southern city of Ponce — near the epicenter of the quakes.
Osvaldo Soto, the secretary of public affairs, singled out the head of the Bureau of Emergency Management, Carlos Acevedo, for dropping the ball. He said Acevedo, who was fired over the weekend, never took an inventory at the warehouse and never informed other officials that the aid was available.
“The issue here is the mismanagement of these goods and food that could have been taken to people who needed them,” Soto told reporters. “The fact that these goods existed and were stored in that place — that was never brought up during our daily [emergency management] meetings.”
“The system didn’t fail us, an individual failed us,” he added.
Officials also confirmed that the warehouse — along with another one in Guaynabo — was under the control of the island’s emergency management agency, known as the NMEAD. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) controls seven other warehouses on the island designed to respond to disasters in the U.S. territory and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In a statement, FEMA said it was continuing to work with local authorities in their efforts to recover from the earthquakes and the 2017 hurricane season but safeguards were needed.
“Given Puerto Rico’s significant history of fiscal irregularities and mismanagement, the federal government will continue to impose stringent fiscal oversight and risk management measures to ensure all disaster relief funding and resources are expended in a manner that directly assists the disaster survivors who need them most while protecting the U.S. taxpayers’ investment against the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse,” the agency said.
Pressed on what Gov. Wanda Vázquez knew about the aid, Soto said that she was aware of the warehouse but “not its contents or how it was managed.”
Along with Acevedo, Vázquez also fired the heads of the housing and family departments. But it’s unclear what role, if any, they played in the missing aid.
The news comes as hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the governor’s palace and the Capitol on Monday, chanting slogans, banging pots and calling for Vázquez to resign. Additional protests were scheduled for Tuesday evening.
Vázquez came to power in August after her predecessor, Ricardo Rosselló, was driven out of office by massive marches sparked by corruption allegations.
Long used to hurricanes, Puerto Rico has been rocked by a series of earthquakes that began on Dec. 28 and peaked with a magnitude 6.4 tremor on Jan. 7. Since then, thousands of people have been sleeping at emergency shelters and improvised tent cities along the southern coast, and many of them desperately needed the types of supplies found at the warehouse.
Adj. Gen. José Reyes, the commander of Puerto Rico’s National Guard, said troops were still delivering aid from the storage unit, including 897 boxes of Pampers, 1,394 cots, 884 tents, 320 boxes of batteries, along with stoves, propane tanks and sheets.
The warehouse was also stocked with pallets of water, baby food and other goods that had expired. Reyes said it was too soon to put a price tag on the aid, as it was unclear how much of it had been donated and how much had been purchased.
The existence of the warehouse was first revealed to most islanders over the weekend on social media, although government officials had visited the site and talked about it in the past.
The governor’s office said a preliminary investigation has been forwarded to the Department of Justice. Soto and Secretary of State Elmer Román said that neither they nor Vázquez have seen that report, and they said it would be unclear if other people would be implicated in the case.
This story was originally published January 21, 2020 at 3:31 PM.
