Dutch Mantell on the situation in Puerto Rico

Mantell via Facebook:

Hello everyone. Don’t know about most of you but these last few days has stressed me out. The shooting in Vegas was and is still unbelievable. The loss of Lance Russell, really saddened me and thousands of wrestling fans. And the devastation in Puerto Rico is beyond belief. So it’s been a tough week.

While most of these events affected me, probably PR the most. Probably because I lived there several times. Booked a couple of wrestling companies there…and booked sellouts all over the island. But I can hardly watch the PR coverage. Every town they show, I’ve been there. And every one of them has been hit with massive damages. It’s been close to 2 weeks now and major areas of the island do not have power and it’s been rumored that some areas won’t have it for 6 months to a year. Imagine trying to live without a power source for that long. No lights, no TV, no AC and you have to have AC in PR. It’s very warm no matter the month. It’s 90 degrees in January. Plus only 30% of hospitals are online. The US government has filled the island with 10,000 workers and PR has their National Guard on duty. But it’s still not enough. People’s houses have no roofs, cars are underwater and water is still standing in the streets. Standing water brings mosquitoes and mosquitoes brings disease. Grocery stores have been flooded and with no power, they won’t be able to stock a lot of items. Telephone service is out and cell coverage is spotty at best. Most areas still are flooded and there’s a big dam that’s on the verge of overflowing. It’s a humanitarian crisis.
unseen in the US. Worse than Katrina and Sandy. It’s bad.

I did talk to a good friend there, Moody and he told me that there is looting in the streets in full view of everybody but nobody cares. People are fighting to get food and clean water. He told me a lot of other stuff too but I’ve gone on too long about it here.

Disasters happen and people hear about them but unless you’re personally involved, it doesn’t affect you as deeply as something like this. That sadly might be the case with Puerto Rico. I’m just glad that they’re still in the news. I truly thought the Las Vegas coverage would ease them off the page.

So this hurricane I think might spell the end of Puerto Rico as we’ve known it. It’s estimated that probably a million Puerto Ricans will be forced to evacuate because the island’s economy is based on tourism. No tourism, no jobs. No jobs, no economy. No economy, no tourists. No tourists, no taxes and money being spent. People will be forced to leave just to eat and pay their bills. And we haven’t even talked about how much debt PR is in right now. It gets worse not better.

Pray for PR. Remember PR is a US Commonwealth and the people are American citizens. If we can bring in 50,000 Middle Eastern refugees, we certainly can bring in our own citizens. Trump needs to understand this.

Didn’t mean for this to be this long. Pardon me for venting on here.