Irma is going to be a godsend for the island!
Lucky folks.
As you know the island is bankrupt, especially the power company. The power company owes bond holders billions that they can’t pay back and the entire island government has declared bankruptcy. No one will loan them a dime now.
Well, someone will-FEMA! They will roll in, see that the local government needs help, and be happy to lend them money. Like all local governments, once they have the “loans”, they will plead poverty to the feds and ask for the loans to be forgiven. It is a routine dance that all fema recipients go through. In this case, the locals really can’t pay the loans back. So they will get new infrastructure-built to federal standards of course, and it won’t cost them anything. This is the best thing that could happen to the island.
Now all they have to do is do everything possible to keep anyone from getting killed, then wait for the feds with the checkbooks to roll on in.
I had a relative in Florida for 35 years that managed to get his house to be at least partly remodeled 3 times by the government due to hurricanes and such …he said as long as you don’t get ridiculous in claim amounts you don’t get hassled much
I’m not sure if the OP understands how a natural disaster works. It’s not like winning a lottery or getting a birthday present.
In order to get an insurance or disaster relief payment, you have to qualify by losing something of value. Then if you’re lucky, somebody might pay you the monetary value of what you lost and you’ll come out even. But that usually doesn’t happen. Usually people get paid less than the value of what they lost.
So those “lucky” Puerto Ricans, who as you acknowledge were already having financial problems, are about to become poorer.
Well I do have some experience with FEMA-I had my house totaled by Katrina and spent 16 months and lots of federal insurance aid rebuilding. I was (and still am, FEMA is still dealing with a few issues from Katrina) involved and observed first-hand FEMA response over a period of years as FEMA and the Corps of Engineers funded and rebuilt local Government infrastructure in my area. To give one example, I could give you dozens, FEMA disaster money is funding our local town drilling another municipal water well (I believe the cost is $3 million) for a part of town and a new shopping center that literally did not exist at the time of Katrina. Our school board has millions of dollars that they set aside to repay Katrina loans that they didn’t spend because Congress forgave the loans. As usual, the rich get richer… The smaller poorer Government entities really could not pay back their loans. So when the Government stepped in to help them, the more well-to-do Government entities literally have more money than they know what to do with. And it is theirs-it is local money they set aside to repay the loans, not federal dollars. As I said, I could give you dozens of examples.
FEMA is structured primarily to fund and help local Governments rebuild after a storm, while the money they spend helping individuals gets all the attention, by design the big dollars go toward the local Governments. Many of the new schools built around New Orleans and the MS Gulf Coast in the last 10 years were paid for mostly if not entirely by federal disaster money. If the school was damaged beyond reasonable repair no matter how old and run-down the building was, FEMA will pay to build a brand-new school, courthouse, police station, convention center, etc. Utilities are treated the same way even if they are privately owned-one of the exceptions to the Government rule.
I suspect you are dealing with FEMA as a private individual. FEMA can be difficult for individuals. If you are talking about local Government-in my experience problems would occur because the local officials were overwhelmed by the disaster and didn’t follow the documentation rules. When the local Government spent $ after a disaster without considering FEMA documentation and rules, they got themselves into trouble. The first thing our local Governments did after Katrina was hire accounting staff to interface with FEMA on a daily basis. Almost all our claims were processed and eventually paid. We had to front the money, but FEMA reimbursed the local Governments 100’s of millions of dollars because we had done the paperwork correctly up front.
Individuals continue to get the short end of the stick. Right now our state Government is trying to change the law to allow individuals who got disaster loans from the Government to qualify for grants. Right now FEMA almost demands that you get a subsidized loan (assuming you don’t have insurance) to pay for rebuilding. But if you get a loan you don’t qualify for federal grants. But if you held out and refused the loan, you got free money. One of the ways FEMA gets a bad reputation.
