News anchorman Luis Penchi has slept about three hours a night since Hurricane Maria turned his radio station into one of the few sources of public information on this battered island.

Working more than 25 hours straight during the height of the devastating storm, the lay Franciscan friar and grandfather has emerged as a light in the darkness for Puerto Rican listeners trapped in a virtual telecommunications blackout.

The powerful storm knocked out electricity, internet, television and cell service for the U.S. territory’s 3.4 million people. When other radio stations went dark, WAPA 680 kept plugging, delivering a 24-hour stream of news, advice, messages and pleas for assistance from listeners desperate to connect with loved ones.

Barefoot and wearing shorts and a wooden crucifix at the San Juan station Wednesday, the bright-eyed Penchi credited retro technology for helping WAPA power through the maelstrom, along with some divine intervention.

“I believe it was an act of God. This is the chosen station,” the 62-year-old said with laugh.

​Hub of communication

In the days and hours since the storm broke, the Spanish-language station has become a cornerstone of news, sending out bulletins across the devastated U.S. territory about relief efforts, road conditions and missing people. In the words of one of its owners, Carmen Blanco, WAPA turned into the unofficial “voice of the government” about the hurricane.

With little working phone service, residents arrive in person at the station with messages to be read on the air.

Visitors have included a cardiac surgeon who made an appeal to locate the mother of a newborn baby girl in urgent need of heart surgery so the infant could be evacuated on a special medical flight to the United States. It worked. Relief workers tracked down the grateful mom.

WAPA got out the word that a nearby home for the elderly had run out of diesel for its generator. Listeners quickly responded with fuel, food and water. The station helped a kidney patient get a ride to a dialysis center, and it scored a coagulant medication for a woman within 45 minutes.

The public has taken notice.

“Those people are going to get some kind of award,” said Pablo Navarro, 74, a listener inspired by the coverage. “They held the whole place together. They were heroic.”

Analog rules

Housed in a modest single-story beige block on the south side of the capital, the station sports an American flag on its logo.

Inside are echoes of an earlier age that for now is the norm in Puerto Rico. With power limited to the station’s generator, there is no air conditioning. Electronic frills have been reduced to the minimum. At the reception area, a woman wrote messages for broadcast on a typewriter.

Anchor Penchi credits such old-school resourcefulness for the station’s durability. He said WAPA stayed on the air because it had maintained its old analogue broadcasting capacity alongside its digital equipment.

Payam Heydari, an expert in radio technology at the University of California, Irvine, said basic analogue equipment tends to provide robust transmission over long distances. In comparison, he said, digital technology is highly dependent on electricity to power the relays needed to carry a signal.

“Therefore as soon as power goes down, so do the relays” on a digital signal, Heydari said.

Prediction comes true

Penchi joined WAPA last year. A veteran journalist, he returned to his native Puerto Rico from a Franciscan brotherhood in the United States to found a separate one on the island. Not long after, he also accepted an offer to work for the family-run commercial station.

The lay friar said a clergyman told him a time would come when Penchi “would be the only voice heard on the radio” in Puerto Rico. He said he laughed it off until Maria hit and he found himself one of the few voices left broadcasting on the island.

Penchi said he is haunted by cellphone calls from people contacting the station for help from their rooftops as floodwaters rose, before the storm cut off communication.

“I heard the cries of the people calling in live on air,” he said.

Since then, Penchi and his coworkers have done all they can to provide relief to the suffering using the power of their radio signal.

Local journalists have stepped in for free to ease the workload on weary WAPA anchors. Other professionals have pitched in too.

The day after the storm, WAPA put out a call for psychologists to come speak with distressed listeners arriving at the station frantic to contact loved ones.

Julio Herran, 44, volunteered. He said he has been there ever since, working as long as 15 hours a day lending an ear and doing his best to comfort the anguished.

“I make them realize they are OK. They are fine,” he said. “Then we write a message to put on the radio.”
…

The women working at ABC Toys on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Mexico City’s working-class Obrera neighborhood drew so little attention to themselves that when the building collapsed in last week’s powerful quake few living nearby could recall them.

In death, they remained nearly as anonymous: Government officials identified them in a list of foreigners killed during the 7.1-magnitude quake as simply “four Taiwanese women.”

But Helen Chin, Amy Huang, Carolina Wang and Gina Lai did have names – and stories that came to a sudden end under the rubble of the building at 168 Bolivar Street.

The glass-and-concrete building housing an assortment of Taiwanese toy and technology businesses, along with a clothing company run by an Argentine-born Jewish immigrant, is where nearly all the foreigners killed in the quake died. Aside from the four Taiwanese women, they include Jaime Askenazi, whose friends affectionately called “Che,” and Pepe Lin, a Taiwanese-born father of two who made his way to Mexico after first moving as a young boy from Paraguay.

“He came here, like many people,” Margarita Cohen, a distant relative said of Askenazi’s arrival from Argentina. “To search for more luck.”

Their numbers were small but collectively their lives provide a snapshot into recent migration to Mexico. As trade ties between China, Taiwan and Mexico have tightened a new wave of immigrants has arrived to invest in factories and open import-export businesses. Larger numbers arrive from other Latin American nations, either hoping to make their way to the United States or improve their economic prospects in Mexico.

“He loved it here,” Moises Lin, Pepe Lin’s younger brother, said. “He found an opportunity to come so he took the chance.”

The building

The businesses at 168 Bolivar Street were located on four floors of offices inside the peeling red-painted concrete building with tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. Each business had no more than a half-dozen employees and there were likely no more than 50 people believed to be inside the building when the quake struck.

ABC Toys had a showroom and administrative office in the building, while Lin ran Dashcam System Mexico, a company providing security cameras for vehicles, from the fourth floor. On the same level Diesel Technic, a German-based auto parts company, operated an exhibition space.

Though the building appeared dated and ill-maintained, Moises Lin and other friends and relatives of those who worked there couldn’t recall them ever complaining about feeling unsafe.

Rather, they saw the modest office in a neighborhood filled with warehouses and convenience stores as a beacon of opportunity.

Before the quake

Carlos Liao, the head of the Economic and Cultural Office of Taipei in Mexico, said the four Taiwanese women included a recent university graduate, a mother of a 3-year-old girl, and a mother and daughter who worked together. Interviews with friends and relatives provided more details about who they were.

Helen Chin left Taiwan with her husband and three children a decade ago. Her daughter, Amy Huang, worked with her at ABC Toys, a family business.

Chin did not speak Spanish, but her daughter seemed to adapt quickly to the family’s new home. She picked up the language and had a tight-knit group of Mexican friends that she traveled with. Photos from their journeys showed Huang smiling during beach outings, a cruise and a birthday party. In one photo, she stands with friends in front of a giant balloon depicting a Mexican mariachi player.

Mercedes de la Fuente, who met Huang through a mutual friend while they were attending the same university, said the 23-year-old was overjoyed when she obtained her Mexican voter ID card, joking with friends in a heavy Asian accent that now she was Mexican.

Recently, she had taken the lead at her family’s business after her father was diagnosed with cancer, de la Fuente said. The recent graduate seemed firmly committed to making ABC Toys a success.

“Her plans were with ABC Toys,” de la Fuente said.

Lin, who worked two floors above the women, had also worked for ABC Toys at one point, according to his brother. Born in Taiwan, Lin moved with his family to Paraguay when he was a child. There his family ran a Taiwanese restaurant in the capital and Lin helped take care of his little brother.

Born Lin Chia Ching, he took the name Jose in Paraguay.

After moving to Mexico when he was about 30, friends began calling him Pepe, a nickname often used for Jose.

Askenazi had also arrived in Mexico as a young adult pursuing the winds of prosperity.

“Argentina was very bad and Mexico was developing very good,” Cohen said.

In Mexico, his family grew to include seven daughters and one son. His clothing business employed a number of people in Mexico City’s Jewish community, Cohen said, and as his company flourished he became known for his generosity.

Friends liked to call him Che, a popular word for “pal” in Argentina.

Earthquake

On Sept. 19, all five were at 168 Bolivar Street when the ground began to tremble. Witness video shows the building toppling in a matter of seconds, leaving a gray cloud of dust in its wake.

Word quickly spread in the tight-knit Taiwanese and Jewish communities that some of their own were trapped in the rubble. In Paraguay, Moises Lim called his brother’s cell phone repeatedly and got no response. He didn’t worry at first, but grew concerned when his sister-in-law called, saying she’d been trying to reach her husband all day and hadn’t been able to reach him.

The Lin family boarded a flight from Paraguay and arrived in Mexico City the next day. Even when he saw the mass of rubble that used to be 168 Bolivar Street, Moises Lin could not believe that his brother might be dead.

One ambulance came and left with a body from the rubble. Then another. Workers found women’s clothes and toys among the debris.

“It can’t be Pepe,” the distraught family members whispered to one another.

Meanwhile, Huang’s and Chin’s families and friends launched a massive online effort to try to locate them, spreading photos and pleading for any information.

Late on the day after the quake struck, Moises Lin said the family got an unexpected call from Pepe Lin’s cell phone. It wasn’t his brother’s voice on the line, but rather that of a rescuer. They had found a destroyed phone on a man’s body and had managed to recover the SIM card with its phone numbers.

“Can you come and check if it’s your brother?” the man asked.

“We went to the morgue,” Moises Lin said. “And it was my brother.”

Aftermath

The four Taiwanese women were all pulled from the wreckage lifeless within three days after the quake. Liao, who spent hours at the search site and accompanied the families, said the force of the collapse left the women nearly unrecognizable. One was identified through a birthmark, another by her jewelry. The last was identified with the help of her acupuncturist.

Two Buddhist monks were flown in from Los Angeles for a traditional ceremony that stretched through the weekend and into Monday, the seventh day of their deaths, when Liao said many Taiwanese believe the deceased passes from the world of the living into heaven.

In the days since, Moises Lin said he’s wondered about the building where his brother was trying to forge his future. He wonders why the company didn’t choose a space that was better maintained. But he considers such questions useless now and is trying not to anguish over them.

“A part of me is frustrated,” he said in Spanish, before switching to English. “But I cannot feel that. Because if I feel that my brother won’t rest in peace.”

All of the women and Pepe Lin were cremated. Relatives recently began the journey of taking their remains home.
…

President Donald Trump’s administration is ending a program that allowed children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to apply for refugee status in the United States before leaving home.

The administration will phase out the Central American Minors (CAM) program during fiscal year 2018, according to a report provided to Congress and obtained by Reuters. That report also sets the overall refugee cap for the year at its lowest level in decades.

The CAM program started at the end of 2014 under the administration of former President Barack Obama as a response to tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and families from Central America who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum in the United States.

Dangerous trip avoided

The program allowed vulnerable young people with parents in the United States to process their applications in their home region and avoid making the dangerous trip through Mexico to the U.S. border on their own, said Karen Musalo, the director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at University of California-Hastings.

“I think there is very little interest in understanding on the part of this administration as to who are refugees and our country’s commitment to protect people fleeing persecution,” Musalo said.

The report said it was ending CAM “because the vast majority of individuals accessing the program were not eligible for refugee resettlement.”

The government will instead focus on “more targeted” refugee processing in Central America, working with the government of Costa Rica, the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration, the report said.

The U.S. had already said in August it was ending one element of the program.

Trump order sparks review of program

An executive order on border security signed by Trump days after he took office in January triggered a review of the program, putting on hold the applications of more than 2,700 children who had been conditionally approved for entry into the United States. Those applications — the bulk of which were for children from El Salvador — have been canceled.

As of Aug. 4, more than 1,500 children and eligible family members had arrived in the United States as refugees under the CAM program since it began in December 2014, according to the State Department. More than 13,000 people have applied for the program since it began, it said.
…

The South American trade bloc Mercosur could seek trade deals with Canada, Australia and New Zealand this year, an Argentine official said Wednesday, as largest members Brazil and Argentina seek to open their economies.

Mercosur, which also includes Uruguay and Paraguay, is working with the European Union to finalize the political framework for a trade deal this year, at a time when the United States under President Donald Trump has been shying away from trade.

“There is a possibility that Mercosur starts negotiations with Canada, Australia and New Zealand this year,” Argentine Commerce Secretary Miguel Braun said at the Thomson Reuters Economic and Business forum in Buenos Aires.

“Integrating ourselves with these countries takes us in the direction we want to go,” he said, pointing to developed economies with high salaries. Argentina alone is seeking a trade agreement with Mexico, and Braun said it was also working on a trade agreement with Chile that would “deepen what we already have.”

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said in New York last week that Santiago was finishing a trade liberalization agreement with Buenos Aires to boost trade and open opportunities for investors.
…

As Puerto Rico struggles with a lack of fuel, water and medical supplies following the devastation of Hurricane Maria, it is pressing the Trump administration to lift a prohibition on foreign ships delivering supplies from the U.S. mainland.

The island’s governor is pushing for the federal government to temporarily waive the Jones Act, a law requiring that all goods shipped between U.S. ports be carried by U.S. owned-and-operated ships. President Donald Trump’s administration has so far not granted his request.

“We’re thinking about that,” Trump told reporters when asked about lifting the Jones Act restrictions on Wednesday. “But we have a lot of shippers and … a lot of people that work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted, and we have a lot of ships out there right now.”

Many of the U.S. territory’s 3.4 million inhabitants are queuing for scarce supplies of gas and diesel to run generators as the island’s electrical grid remains crippled a week after Maria hit. Government-supplied water trucks have been mobbed.

Puerto Rico gets most of its fuel by ship from the United States, but one of its two main ports is closed and the other is operating only during the daytime.

“We expect them to waive it (the Jones Act),” Governor Ricardo Rossello told CNN on Wednesday, noting there was a brief waiver issued after Hurricane Irma, which was much less devastating as it grazed past the island en route for Florida earlier this month.

Support of shipping waiver

Members of Congress from both parties have supported an emergency waiver, he said.

The U.S. government has issued periodic Jones Act waivers following severe storms in the past, to allow the use of cheaper or more readily available foreign-flagged ships.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which waived the law after Irma and after Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August, said on Wednesday it was considering a request by members of Congress for a waiver, but had not received any formal requests from shippers or other branches of the federal government.

          

Gregory Moore, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, an office of Homeland Security, said in a statement on Tuesday that an agency assessment showed there was “sufficient capacity” of U.S.-flagged vessels to move commodities to Puerto Rico.

“The limitation is going to be port capacity to offload and transit, not vessel availability,” he said.  

  Lack of water, fuel

Maria, the most powerful storm to hit Puerto Rico in nearly 90 years, caused widespread flooding and damage to homes and infrastructure.

Residents are scrambling to find clean water, with experts concerned about a looming public health crisis posed by the damaged water system.

On Tuesday, hundreds of people crowded around a government water tanker in the northeastern municipality of Canovanas, some 15 miles (25 km) east of the capital San Juan, with containers of every size and shape after a wait that for many had lasted days.   

        

“I know there can be more help,” said Juan Cruz as he filled a container. Residents there said it was the first such truck to visit their neighborhood since the hurricane struck.

“We can use more help,” Cruz said. “We are U.S. citizens. We are supposed to be treated equally.”

Long waits for gasoline, diesel

Some also waited hours for gasoline and diesel to fill their automobile tanks and power generators to light their homes.

            

U.S. Air Force Colonel Michael Valle, on hand for relief efforts in San Juan, said he was most concerned about “the level of desperation” that could arise if fuel distribution did not return to normal within a couple of weeks.

San Juan resident Joselyn Velasquez said she thought aid was too slow to arrive.

“They say that it is coming from the United States, but who are they giving it to because I haven’t received any at my house?” Velasquez asked. “No one has knocked on my door and said, ‘Here is some rice.’”

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency said by Wednesday that it had delivered more than 4.4 million meals and 6.5 million liters of water in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands since Maria ravaged the Caribbean.

Waiting on a request

In Washington, Republican leaders who control both chambers of Congress have said they are prepared to boost disaster funding, but are waiting for a detailed request from the Trump administration.

In the meantime, the administration still has $5 billion in aid in a disaster relief fund, and Congress has also approved about $7 billion more that will become available on Oct. 1.

 
…

With Venezuela’s economic crisis leaving consumers struggling to buy basic staple foods, small Caracas brewery Social Club might seem out of place selling craft beer that costs per bottle what a worker earning the minimum wage makes in two days.

But business is booming.

Demand for Social Club’s beer regularly outstrips the 3,000 liters (793 gallons) it produces a month, according to its owners. Most of it is sold on weekends at a beer garden set up in the garage of its small production facility.

Brewers like Social Club are a reminder that despite the widespread social misery caused by the country’s economic crisis, an appetite remains among well-heeled Venezuelans for high-end niche products like craft beer.

At the same time, these small brewers are carving out a market in preparation for an eventual economic rebound.

“Venezuelans continue to be vain creatures who like to be in the vanguard, who like to keep up with what’s in fashion,” said Victor Querales, 32, one of Social Club’s owners, speaking on a Friday afternoon before clients began arriving. “There’s still a premium market that isn’t very sensitive to prices.”

The country now has around 30 craft brewers with commercial operations that supply high-end liquor stores and restaurants or deliver made-to-order brews for parties or weddings, according to the Craft Beer Association of Venezuela.

Craft brew still represents less than 1 percent of the market, which remains dominated by domestic brewing giant Polar and its smaller rival Regional.

But the last five years has seen the emergence of start-ups such as Norte del Sur and Pisse Des Gottes, both of which have won medals in international brewing contests.

The fortunes of Venezuelan craft brewers contrast with those of most major industries, which operate well below capacity as triple-digit inflation and byzantine currency controls make large-scale production of almost anything nearly impossible.

Social Club offers tours of its small brew facility and an adjacent bar that sells styles ranging from bitter coffee stouts to aromatic Belgian saisons.

Its production volume is tiny, reaching about 2 percent of the 1.8 million liters per year that the Colorado-based Brewers Association describes as the maximum for the denomination “microbrewer” in the United States.

Though Social Club’s fare is exorbitant by local standards, it is among the cheapest craft brews in the world at around $0.80 for a 12-ounce (354 milliliter) glass. U.S. brewpubs would likely charge at least five times that for a similar product.

Nation of beer drinkers

Costs are nonetheless a concern.

Malt and hops must be imported because they don’t grow in Venezuela’s tropical climate, leaving brewers at the mercy of the steadily depreciating bolivar currency.

And brewers often say their biggest challenge is winning over Venezuelans unaccustomed to beers with stronger flavors and higher alcohol content than commercial alternatives.

But they believe there is room to grow, in large part because Venezuelans have always been avid beer drinkers.

In 2010, at the height of an oil-fueled economic boom, the OPEC nation had the highest per capita beer consumption in Latin America and the ninth-highest in the world, according to figures compiled by Japan’s Kirin Holdings, which owns breweries in Brazil and Australia.

But per capita beer consumption fell to 25th in the world by 2015 as the drop in oil prices pushed the economy into free-fall.

Such slumping demand means microbreweries are far from a surefire route to success.

Some young would-be entrepreneurs take brewing classes with plans to start up businesses, only to end up selling off their equipment as they raise money to emigrate, according to interviews with brewers involved in such training.

But there are unlikely success stories too.

Architect Gustavo Izarra took up home-brew after visiting his daughter in Belgium in 2012. He set up Caleta brewery in 2015, just as the demand for architectural services was collapsing along with the economy.

He has since become the go-to design consultant for breweries including Social Club that are upgrading their facilities.

“People have limited spending power, so you end up with a product that for most people is out of reach,” said Izarra, 60.

“But nonetheless, people keep getting more and more interested in trying craft beer.”

 

 
…

Relatives helped Maribel Valentin Espino find shelter when Hurricane Maria roared through her community in northern Puerto Rico. Neighbors formed volunteer brigades to cut fallen trees and clear twisty mountain roads after the storm had passed. Now, friends and a local cattle ranch provide the water they need to survive in the tropical heat.

Valentin and her husband say they have not seen anyone from the Puerto Rican government, much less the Federal Emergency Management Agency, since the storm tore up the island Sept. 20, killing at least 16 people and leaving nearly all 3.4 million people in Puerto Rico without power and most without water.

 

“People say FEMA is going to help us,” Valentin said Tuesday as she showed Associated Press journalists around the sodden wreckage of her home. “We’re waiting.”

 

Many others are also waiting for help from anyone from the federal or Puerto Rican government. But the scope of the devastation is so broad, and the relief effort so concentrated in San Juan, that many people from outside the capital say they have received little to no help.

 

Valentin, her husband and teenage son live in one such area, Montebello, a 20-minute drive into what used to be lushly forested mountains near the northern coastal municipality of Manati. Hurricane Maria’s Category 4 winds stripped the trees bare and scattered them like matchsticks. “It seemed like a monster,” she recalled.

 

The roads are passable now but the community is still isolated. “Nobody has visited, not from the government, not from the city, no one,” said Antonio Velez, a 64-year-old who has lived there his entire life.

 

The same complaint echoed throughout the southeast coastal town of Yabucoa, the first town Maria hit as it barreled across the island with 155 mph winds.

 

“Nothing, nothing, nothing,” said 58-year-old retiree Angel Luis Rodriguez. “I’ve lost everything, and no one has shown up to see if anyone lives here.”

 

At a nearby river, dozens of people gathered to bathe and wash clothes as they grumbled about the lack of aid.

 

“There’s been no help from the mayor or from the federal government,” said 64-year-old retiree Maria Rodriguez as she held a coconut in her right hand and took sips from it. “After Georges hit us (in 1998), they responded quickly. But now? Nothing. We need water and food.”

 

Nearby, one girl engaged in a thumb war with a friend as she filled an empty water bottle with her other hand. Downstream, a woman sat cross-legged in the water behind a friend and helped wash her hair.

The recovery in the first week since the storm has largely been a do-it-yourself affair. People collect water from wells and streams, clear roads and repair their own homes when they are not waiting in daylong lines for gasoline and diesel. For most, the only visible sign of authority are police officers directing traffic, a critical service because traffic lights are out across the island.

 

“I have seen a lot of helicopters go by. I assume those are people from FEMA,” said Jesus Argilagos, who lives in Manati and works at a grocery store that is only open part of the day because of the power crisis. “People get pissed off because they see them going back and forth and not doing anything.”

There are several thousand U.S. federal employees in Puerto Rico helping with the recovery effort. They are most visible in San Juan, where officials with FEMA, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection have a presence at hotels that before the storm served tourists in the Condado neighborhood or at the convention center that has become a staging ground for relief efforts.

 

Federal workers supplied diesel to generators at hospitals and delivered desperately needed food and water to hard-hit communities across the island. They have repaired the air traffic control systems and power at the airport, which is far from normal operations with only about a dozen commercial flights per day. U.S. agents have also provided security across the island and the Coast Guard has worked with local authorities to restore the sea ports, a vital link because Puerto Rico is almost completely dependent on imports.

 

In addition, teams from the Army Corps of Engineers are helping to repair the electricity grid and to inspect and look for ways to avert the collapse of a dam near the western town of Quebradillas that has developed a crack and that officials have said could potentially fail. And personnel from Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs have provided care and helped evacuate people from Puerto Rico with chronic medical conditions.

 

Teams also were scheduled to visit the central mountain town of Aibonito, which was cut off from the rest of the island for five days. Many people began rationing their food and water supplies as they dwindled, unclear of when they would have contact with the outside world.

 

“We thought somebody was going to stop by,” said Ana Lidia Mendoza, a 48-year-old cook at a barbecue restaurant who lost part of her roof. “They told us that we had to stay calm.”

Gov. Ricardo Rossello and Resident Commissioner Jennifer Gonzalez, the island’s representative in Congress, have said they intend to seek more than a billion dollars in federal assistance and they have praised the response to the disaster by President Donald Trump, who plans to visit Puerto Rico next week, as well as FEMA Administrator Brock Long.

 

“I am confident that they understand the seriousness of the situation,” the governor said Tuesday.

 

Still, it is hard to avoid the fact that the response looks different than previous ones. After hurricanes in Louisiana, Texas and Florida, waves of power company trucks from other states descended in long convoys, something that is obviously not possible on an island 1,000 miles to the southeast of the mainland. After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, the U.S. military sent ships and the skies seemed to be filled with heavy-lift helicopters and planes carrying emergency relief, though the scale of that disaster was far worse.

 

Hurricane Maria was the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in nearly 100 years and officials say the cost of recovery will dwarf that of the punishing Hurricane Georges in 1998. Whatever the final bill, Valentin just hopes it will factor in people like her. “If FEMA helps us, we are going to build again,” she said.

 

 
…

The 220 percent tariff imposed by the United States on Bombardier Inc’s CSeries jet is an “attack” on Quebec and Canada, the province’s Premier Philippe Couillard said on Wednesday.

“Quebec has been attacked. And Quebec will resist. And Quebec will unite. All together, we will protect our workers. All together, we will be proud of our engineering,” he told reporters at a news conference.

The government of Quebec has taken a $1 billion stake in Bombardier’s CSeries jet. But Couillard said Wednesday the company had received “not a cent” in government subsidies.

The U.S. Commerce Department on Tuesday slapped preliminary anti-subsidy duties on Bombardier’s CSeries jets after rival Boeing Co accused Canada of unfairly subsidizing the aircraft, a move likely to strain trade relations between the neighbors.
…

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. islands devastated by Hurricane Maria are getting massive help. Speaking at a joint news conference with the visiting Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, Trump said his administration is doing all it can to help the hurricane victims, and denied he was distracted by his feud with football team members who have staged protests during the playing of the national anthem. Zlatica Hoke reports.
…

On paper at least, the Mexico City school appeared to be structurally sound and built to withstand a major earthquake. But it collapsed, killing 26 people, most of them children. Authorities are now looking into whether an apartment reportedly built on top of the two-story school was to blame.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the borough president of the southern Mexico City district where the school went down in the 7.1 magnitude quake, said at a news conference Tuesday that the school appeared to have its paperwork in order, at least according to documents filed by architects and engineers who supposedly inspected the structure. She said investigators would look for abnormalities not revealed in those documents.

“We can’t stop just with the paperwork,” Sheinbaum said. “We are going to do a review of the building itself.”

Authorities said that the owner of the privately owned Enrique Rebsamen school built an apartment for herself on top of the collapsed wing, which local media said included a Jacuzzi, and were looking into whether the extra weight may have played a role in the collapse.

Sheinbaum said that she didn’t know whether that was true, but that the owner, Mónica García Villegas, had a permit dating to 1983 to build a school and apartments on the lot, though it was unclear whether she had permission to add a third story to the section of the school that collapsed.

Were standards followed?

The school was just one of dozens of buildings that collapsed in the September 19 quake that killed at least 333 people, 194 of them in Mexico City. Questions have been raised about whether new building standards put in place after a 1985 quake that killed 9,500 people had been adequately followed.

Although construction began on the school in 1983 — two years before the new codes went into effect — it was expanded over the next 34 years with no evidence of noncompliance, Sheinbaum said. She said the only immediately evident paperwork problems during that time were two cases of unregistered expansion work, and Garcia Villegas paid a fine for not registering the work and was allowed to proceed.

Phone calls to a number registered to Garcia Villegas — who was pulled alive from the rubble — rang unanswered.

Seismologists and engineers say the Mexico City buildings most at risk in a quake are those, like the school building, that were built atop an Aztec-era lake bed, where the muddy soil can amplify earthquake waves.

But, although an architect signed a document certifying the school was structurally sound, experts questioned the method used to evaluate it, which Sheinbaum said involved piling sandbags on its upper floors to simulate 85 percent of the structure’s maximum design-carrying weight and then measuring the resulting floor sag.

Kit Miyamoto, a structural engineer and California Seismic Safety Commission member, said sandbags can’t test for earthquake resistance.

“Seismic is a lateral force, so if you just put a whole bunch of sandbags, it is not going to tell you the story of the seismic capacity of the building at all,” Miyamoto said. “You can do testing, to determine what kind of reinforcement” a building has, including ground-penetrating radar or exposing rebar.

Additions, floors

The school’s first wing was built in 1983, but other additions and floors were added over the years, said Francisco Garcia Alvarez, president of the Mexican Society of Structural Engineers, who evaluated the school site after its collapse.

A third floor appeared to have been added recently to the original 1983 structure that was toppled in the quake, raising questions about what construction permits, if any, the school had obtained, how recently it had been inspected and what architectural plans were submitted in the first place. Paperwork filed as recently as June by a private architect working for the school asserted that the parcel had not been modified in a way that would violate the permitted land use.

The quake, whose epicenter was about 100 miles from the capital, hit the city’s south side where the school is located with a force much stronger than the original school structure was built to withstand in the early 1980s, Garcia Alvarez said.

That caused a failure in the building’s joints where the columns met the beams, he said, noting that the addition of a third floor would have added more weight to the structure. Still, he said, its possible role in the collapse needed further study.

Sheinbaum, who is widely expected to run for mayor, faces heightened political scrutiny over the school’s collapse, which killed 19 children and seven adults, leaving behind a pile of wreckage still visible in a cordoned-off street of the leafy neighborhood manned by soldiers.

“We all just keep working, but then all of a sudden it hits you,” said Alfonso Martinez, one of hundreds of volunteers who have been ferrying shovels, hard hats, food and water to rescue workers since the earthquake struck last week. “People are going in and out of grief about all the lives that were lost.”

Neighbors said that the school had grown quickly over the years and they had noted new construction. “We saw there was a third floor put on there, but we didn’t suspect someone was living there,” said Juan Antonio Gudino. “I just thought it was an office.”

Across Mexico City, 40 buildings collapsed in the earthquake and 500 others were so severely damaged they will have to be demolished or receive major structural reinforcement, according to Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera. Another 1,300 are reparable, and about 10,000 buildings inspected so far were found to be habitable.

Reforms helped

Still, experts stressed that reforms to building codes following the 1985 earthquake had lowered the number of casualties. But, they said, more needed to be done to ensure compliance.

“From what we can tell, the new codes worked well and helped avoid more harm,” said Eduardo Miranda, a professor in Stanford University’s civil and structural engineering department, who evaluated buildings following the quake. “But some of these buildings may have failed because people did not follow the codes.”

Unlike in the United States, where city engineers typically check architectural drawings for structural integrity, authorities in Mexico City perform an administrative check of submitted plans, but don’t vet structural calculations, he said.

Two blocks from the school, bouquets of white chrysanthemums line a makeshift memorial with the names of those pulled from the wreckage — a reminder of the tragedy that befell the school.

“We were all focused on following the code,” Sheinbaum said. “We are all asking ourselves if we could have done more.”
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