Fuck Puerto Rico

I should have written about this sooner but, since it’s resurging in the news again this week I want to write about it now.

The night hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico – I was very curious about this. The eye of this extremely powerful hurricane was due to clip the northeast part of the island and, being that this was a heavily populated and supposedly developed place, I wanted to check out live news reports as the hurricane hit.

Some people like watching trains or airplanes. I sometimes like to check out live news broadcasts of hurricanes because as natural phenomena they truly fascinate me. The top windspeeds of Maria, close to the eye, if I remember correctly were in the 140 mph range. You just don’t see 140 mph winds normally on the surface of Earth unless you’re flying in an airplane and looking out the window.

So I went and did a search for the major tv stations in Puerto Rico. You can do this easily with a search engine. I did several searches and found several stations and visited their websites. During major events most tv stations will have links to their live broadcasts on their websites. So I checked out the stations. What I saw – or more precisely what I didn’t see – shocked me. In a bad way.

What I saw – or what I didn’t see – was any recognition, any serious understanding about what the fuck was about to happen to the island, nor any attempt to seriously inform people of the island what the fuck was going on and how to prepare for it.

I am not kidding you, one of the major stations on the island was showing reruns of a fucking soap opera (in Spanish of course) literally minutes before the eye was forecast to hit the island. A fucking soap opera.

Another station was showing reruns of a news clip that was like some special interest piece exploring the feelings of a couple residents in advance of the hurricane. There was absolutely no sense of urgency, and there was nothing live being broadcast.

Had this been the United States, I guarantee you that every news station would have been broadcasting live. Regular programming would have been interrupted. There would have been serious mobilization on many levels before this thing hit.

What I got from watching the tv stations in Puerto Rico was that that country – I will call it a country because it’s pretty much separate from the USA – is a joke.

Being a country in the middle of the Caribbean sea where hurricanes are not infrequent, one would think that a sense of preparedness and seriousness would exist regarding them. But hell fucking no. I could not believe that one of the main tv stations of the island was showing fucking soap opera reruns while one of the most powerful hurricanes in years was literally only minutes away from barreling into the island.

Now the news has come out that nearly 3,000 people died there. And the mayor or governor or whatever she is of the island is bitching at Trump apparently. Yeah. Whose responsiblity was it to prepare. What the fuck were these people doing? My guess is – it’s a crooked country and the rich elites who run the government and the tv stations had no sense of responsibility. They fucked off while this huge storm hammered their island, eventually killing close to 3,000 people and causing massive devastation.