Opa-Locka- U.S. Senators Rick Scott (R) and Marco Rubio (R) held a press conference at the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station shortly after conducting surveying the hurricane-battered northern Bahamian islands on Friday.
“It looks like a bomb” went off,” stated Rubio “It is not place that can sustain life much longer.”
“Catastrophic” was the word the senators used to describe the condition on the ground after Hurricane Dorian passed through, as hundreds of people are still listed as missing, and thousands more are still living out of emergency shelters.
Sen. Rubio said that it’s not as easy to deliver aide as people might think, considering that “the underwater topography has been changed” and the U.S. “can’t just go in there” without first getting permission.
Rubio said that all the goodwill and donations Americans have been offering has hit a roadblock, so to speak, as all the seaports and airports in that immediate area are not functional.
“There is no way to get that stuff in there,” said Rubio. “It’s a catastrophe.”
Rubio said that because the situation in the northern Bahamas is “increasingly becoming uninhabitable,” the only government agency with the “capability to do this heavy lift” was the Department of Defense
Both Scott and Rubio said that the U.S. government is working very closing with the Bahamian government and that the lead U.S. agency to deliver aide is the USAID.
But before any aide could be sent, Bahamian officials need to make a formal request for aid, and as Scott said after speaking to that country’s prime minister, “they need to tell us exactly what they need.”
According to Scott and Rubio, federal help will be on the way.i
