US won't waive shipping restrictions for Puerto Rico relief

Read the article.

This is a political issue with select politicians trying to get in the spotlight. This has nothing to do with disaster response, and everything to do with political grandstanding for camera time.

DHS stated, "this does not help the U.S. island territory due to damaged ports preventing ships from docking. The limitation is going to be port capacity to offload and transit, not vessel availability,”.

Bottom line is that until the ports are repaired, no additional shipping can be accommodated. You do not speed the recovery by crowding the ports to point of non-function. Nor does keeping a bunch of ships in the queue waiting to dock help the issue.

You control the scenario and schedule in the ships that are most critical to the response (e.g., USS Mercy; a Carrier with huge flight deck, power, and desalinization capability; and brown water Navy assets with construction equipment). The first rule in Disaster recovery is to control the response. If you don't, you will be choked to death with well meaning responders that actually slow and inhibit the response.

The recovery effort is being handled in a triage fashion with repairs to the ports first. Then bring in all the ships you can handle. Until that point, you have the cart before the horse. And grousing about cheap goods doesn't mean a damn thing when you cant get the power back on, hospital space, or fresh water because their is no room in the port that is crowded with cheap goods.

The Law in question does not apply to Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Oklahoma so listing them in this thread doesn't make sense. I know the article says it was waved but how many foreign ships docked at one US port and then rerouted to one of those locations to unload the last portion of their goods? My guess is pretty close to zero. The Jones Act should be done away with whether there had been a hurricane or not. The only people it helps are unions who control US mainland ports. It raises prices in all US territories and Hawaii since no ships can deliver goods directly to those locations but instead have to unload on the mainland and then reload onto US union controlled ships (which cost considerably more to operate thereby increasing the cost of the goods they carry) to transport the materials to their final non-CONUS location.

"MAKE *AMERICA* GREAT AGAIN"