Trump Administration Shamed Into Send USNS Comfort to Aid Puerto Rico?

The Comfort

Recently, I noted in a Facebook post that Der Trumpenführer could find the time to generate a tweet storm for more than 5 days over NFL players allegedly disrespecting the American flag, but he seemingly could not find time to direct his administration to focus the same level of aid to Puerto Rico as was focused on Texas.  I suggested the reason why: The majority of residents of Puerto Rico are brown skinned and worse yet in the mind of Trump and his supporters, a majority do not speak English.  In Trump world and the world of today's GOP that means these people in Puerto Rico are simply not fully human and, therefore, disposable trash.  Yes, I am livid, but it's similar to the mindset that I confronted when I was fired for being gay and had no legal resource under either Virginia or federal law.   I simply did not matter because I was "other." Worse yet, neither did my children.   Ironically, it may have taken tweets by Hillary Clinton to get the Trump administration to get off its ass and order the USNS Comfort - currently docked directly across Hampton Roads harbor from my home - to head to Puerto Rico with its 1000 hospital beds and 80 bed ICU and 12 operating rooms to aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria which left many hospitals without power and literally causing people to die:  

President Trump, Sec. Mattis, and DOD should send the Navy, including the USNS Comfort, to Puerto Rico now. These are American citizens.

A piece at Daily Kos looks at the travesty.  Here are highlights:

Eight hundred and ninety-four feet long, 106 feet wide, and weighing 69,360 tons, USNS Comfort is a complete ocean-going medical facility with 1,000 patient beds including 80 for intensive care patients. Along with 12 operating rooms she boasts a complete dental clinic, optometry lab and pharmacy, X-ray machines, CT scanners, oxygen and fresh water production plants, capacity to store 5,000 units of blood, laundry operations, and a morgue.

She’s the size of a 20th century supertanker. Indeed, she was a supertanker — the SS Rose City — until purchased by the Navy in 1987 and converted to serve her current lifesaving mission. She and her sister ship in the Pacific, USNS Mercy, are among the rare few assets of the obscenely wealthy US military devoted exclusively to saving, rather than to taking, lives.

But today, as Puerto Rico and its 3.4 million American citizens slowly die with the island’s hospitals without power and in ruins, Comfort remains snugly berthed in her home port of Norfolk, Virginia.

Thomas LaCrosse, the Pentagon’s director of defense support to civil authorities, said U.S. officials discussed deploying the USNS Comfort to Puerto Rico over the weekend but decided that it should stay in Norfolk because it could not get close enough to any port to avoid using helicopter support to get patients to and from the ship.

True enough, the behemoth ship’s deep draft of 30+ feet bars it from San Juan harbor’s 32 to 35 foot channels even at the best of times (and these are far from San Juan’s best times). But, unmentioned in the WaPo article quoted above, that’s nothing new for the Comfort, which routinely anchors a mile or two offshore to serve disaster sites, as it did following Haiti’s devastating earthquake or, again, as it fearlessly did in 2007 in the teeth of a “storm of a decade” off Corinto, Nicaragua, where it anchored 1.5 miles offshore to receive patients. It is such a common fact in the life of this ship of mercy that militaryfactory.com notes as a mere aside that

Comfort has a deep draft and, in many ports, she has to stand offshore at least a mile. To receive wounded, Comfort has a large day-and-night helo pad.

Puerto Ricans, like all other American citizens, should be deeply chilled by the Trump administration’s stubborn refusal to deploy the Comfort, buttressed by such a transparently flimsy excuse. Because if they’re lying about the reason for their decision, then we must ask what the real reason is...and the answer is terrifying.

It can only be this: Trump intends to abandon Puerto Rico at the first opportunity, leaving its 3.4 million American citizens in their current Stone Age hell forever.

Trump is leaving the Comfort safe in Norfolk’s harbor because he does not intend to devote the years of effort, and the hundreds of billions of dollars, it will require to lift Puerto Rico back out of the Stone Age. And he doesn’t want to make that too obvious when the quiet pull-out soon begins. . . This is #TrumpsKatrina
 UPDATED: As of 3:30 PM Eastern, NBC is now quoting FEMA administrator Brock Long announcing, in a reversal of last night’s DOD comments, that USNS Comfort has just been ordered to sail for Puerto Rico. For those who are wondering, Comfort is normally required to be able to sail within 5 days after receiving the order, although it has occasionally done so within 3 days (there are about one thousand mostly civilian medical personnel + merchant seamen to mobilize, plus enormous stores of perishable medical supplies to load, plus all the usual ship’s stores to support a full complement of 2,000 souls). Comfort’s top speed is about 20 MPH, and it is (very roughly) about 1,200 miles from Norfolk to San Juan. So we’re looking at another 6-8 days before it arrives in Puerto Rican waters.