The Conversation asked Ivis García, an urban planner who has researched disaster recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, to explain how the U.S. government responds to disasters like these and how Maui’s geography could interfere with aid delivery.
Is it harder for aid to reach an island than the US mainland?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which delivers emergency assistance after disasters, has to deal with big transportation challenges in cases like this. Initially, FEMA will be focused on bringing food, generators, cots, meals and anything else people need, and that aid will be arriving on planes and boats rather than by road.
Later, FEMA might bring temporary homes – often called trailers – but only if there’s enough suitable land to accommodate them. There were not a lot of FEMA-supplied trailers in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck in 2017. On islands, like Maui, there’s usually not a lot of room to set up trailer parks, whether or not a disaster has just occurred.
Likewise, it will be harder to deploy emergency personnel. Aid workers will have more trouble getting to Maui than they would have arriving in North Carolina, for example. And there could be few places for them to stay. It’s not clear if that’s going to be a problem on Maui, where there were about 26,000 hotel rooms before the wildfires broke out.
Everything about the immediate response to a disaster in places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico is more expensive than on the mainland. That includes food, shelter and transportation. You can’t just drive there or go rent a car when you arrive. There’s typically little public transportation available, and there are few roads even if an aid worker can obtain a vehicle.
When aid does arrive by boat, unloading it can be hard and take a long time. The disaster may have damaged the local harbors and ports, and the harbors in places like Lahaina are usually small and not suited for cargo. Reports don’t indicate that Kahului, Maui’s cargo port, was damaged.
The government has the power to issue a waiver of the Jones Act during disasters. Former President Donald Trump issued, a 10-day waiver after Hurricane Maria.
Some members of Congress have sought for years to repeal the Jones Act, at least for shipping to remote places like Hawaii, Alaska, Guam and Puerto Rico, without success.
The Conversation asked Ivis García, an urban planner who has researched disaster recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, to explain how the U.S. government responds to disasters like these and how Maui’s geography could interfere with aid delivery.
Is it harder for aid to reach an island than the US mainland?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which delivers emergency assistance after disasters, has to deal with big transportation challenges in cases like this. Initially, FEMA will be focused on bringing food, generators, cots, meals and anything else people need, and that aid will be arriving on planes and boats rather than by road.
Later, FEMA might bring temporary homes – often called trailers – but only if there’s enough suitable land to accommodate them. There were not a lot of FEMA-supplied trailers in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck in 2017. On islands, like Maui, there’s usually not a lot of room to set up trailer parks, whether or not a disaster has just occurred.
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