His comments diverge significantly from what another senior FEMA official told CBS News’ David Begnaud on Wednesday. “If [FEMA] put that water on that runway, there will be hell to pay … If we did that, we’re going to fess up to it,” the official told him.
According to a new Washington Post Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 50 percent of Puerto Ricans say people in their households could not get enough water to drink in the year since Maria.
The General Services Administration in Puerto Rico (GSA) says it requested FEMA’s inventory of excess water through a federal program on April 17 and was given approval to use the supplies on April 26. In total, documents show the GSA claimed about 20,000 pallets of bottled water.
On Wednesday, the Puerto Rican government placed much of the blame for the abandoned bottles on FEMA. A statement from the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration on Wednesday outlined what they saw as FEMA’s missteps in handling the water bottles. They said FEMA should have distributed the water to victims on the island, since they were in the agency’s possession. They also said the runway in Ceiba is federally managed land, and that FEMA should have deemed the water bottles “excess inventory” months before it did.
Puerto Rico’s governor last month raised the official death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975. President Trump questioned the numbers on Twitter Thursday morning, blaming Democrats who he said were trying “to make me look as bad as possible.”
