Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Brock Long on Sunday refuted the latest criticism of recovery efforts by the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico — calling it “political noise.”
In an interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” Long pushed back on the Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz’s tweets about the help the island has received since the devastation caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
“We filtered out the mayor a long time ago,” Long said. “We don't have time for the political noise. The bottom line is, is that we are making progress every day in conjunction with the governor. And in regards to the power failure, we're restringing a very fragile system every day. As we make progress, simple thunder storms pass through, knocked the progress out.”
Of the hospital power outages, Long said “we built an entire 911 system.”
“We monitor the hospital system daily,” he said. “And so if there is a power failure at a hospital, which we've seen two of, you know, over this past week, we're actually [removing] the ICU patients out of those hospitals, onto the USS Comfort. And we continue to stabilize that situation with hospitals.”