The Senate sent President Donald Trump a $36.5 billion hurricane relief bill Tuesday that gives Puerto Rico access to $4.9 billion in low-interest Treasury loans, amid concerns that recovery efforts from the recent disasters will require significantly more funding, Bloomberg News reported.
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For the sprawling effort to restore Puerto Rico’s crippled electrical grid, the territory’s state-owned utility has turned to a two-year-old company from Montana that had just two full-time employees on the day Hurricane Maria made landfall, the Washington Post reported today.
The Senate is moving forward on a disaster aid package this week, despite concerns from some lawmakers that it would “bail out”' the struggling federal flood insurance program and doesn’t include enough money to help states recover from devastating hurricanes, USA Today reported today.
It has been a month since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm and pummeled the island with sustained winds of 155 mph, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The storm devastated Puerto Rico’s water system, power grid, road network and cellphone infrastructure, and Maria is now responsible for at least 48 deaths.