Thread by @BillWeirCNN

Our footage of the 30 million bottles of wasted water in Puerto Rico seems to have touched a nerve on this little website we call home.
(Deep inhale)
May I thread?....

I was here right after the storm and came back a month later. It was a humanitarian crisis unlike any I'd seen since Banda Aceh in '04 and Haiti in '10.

A month after the storm, American were still drinking rain from improvised pipes. 6 months after the storm, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF Americans were still living in roofless houses with no lights, no AC and plenty of mosquitos.

But after I posted our drone shots of all that precious water going to waste in the sun, the pictures became a political/tribal Rorschach test...and a surprising number of folks seem eager to put all the blame on Puerto Rico.
But here's some context...

Two days after the Haiti quake, 8,000 U.S. troops were en route.
Two weeks after the quake, 22,000 troops, 33 ships and 300 helicopters were on a FOREIGN island after an UNPREDICTABLE natural event.
washingtonpost.com/investigations…

But for our own countrymen...American citizens who die in our wars and play on our fantasy teams and write our musicals (and for a generation, made most of our medicine)...they never saw anything close to that response.
Even though hurricanes are dreadfully predictable.

But to a woefully overstretched FEMA's credit, when they finally realized Maria's pain, they tried to flood the zone.
But as any supply chain wiz from Wal Mart or Fed Ex will tell you, it's all about timing.
And if you don't plan at the beginning, nothing gets there on time.

Folks in Puerto Rico should be asking their officials hard questions about all that water. There were obvious screwups all down the line.
But if you're in the Carolinas tonight, wondering if/when the FEMA calvary will come rising over the hill...

...I spent some time with a weary @FEMA_Brock after the hellish summer of '17 and he has some thoughts.
edition.cnn.com/2017/12/19/pol…