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At 9PM ET September 20, ABC News reported
The island of Puerto Rico has been "destroyed" after Hurricane Maria made landfall there as a Category 4 storm Wednesday morning, according to emergency officials.
Puerto Rico's office of emergency management confirmed that 100 percent of the U.S. territory had lost power, noting that anyone with electricity was using a generator.
Multiple transmission lines sustained damage from the storm, said Ricardo Ramos, director of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. Ramos said he hopes to begin launching helicopters by this weekends to begin inspecting the transmission lines.
Telecommunications throughout the island have "collapsed", Abner Gomez Cortes, executive director of Puerto Rico's office of emergency management and disaster administration agency, told ABC News.
[...] Cortes described Maria as an unprecedented storm, adding that the island had not seen a storm of that strength since 1928.
[...] Puerto Rico was still experiencing tropical-storm force winds Wednesday afternoon, forcing emergency services and search and rescue teams to wait before heading out to assess the damage, Cortes said.
More than 12,000 people are currently in shelters, and hospitals are now running on generators, Cortes said. Two hospitals--one in Caguas and one in Bayamon--have been damaged.
No deaths have been reported so far, but catastrophic flooding is currently taking place on the island. Multiple rain gauges have reported between 18 and 24 inches of rain, with some approaching the 30-inch mark over the last 24 hours.
Flooding is the danger "that will take lives", Cortes said, advising residents not to venture out of their homes until Thursday because "it is not safe to go out and observe".
[...] As of 8 p.m. ET, Maria had weakened to a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained wind of 110 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.
[...] Some strengthening is possible now that the storm is back over the ocean, so Maria has potential to become a Category 3 hurricane again.
National Hurricane Center graphics for Maria.
Map of Caribbean Islands.
At 15:20 UTC, Mashable reported
Clips shot in the [cities] of Farjado, San Juan, and Guyama show buildings experiencing extreme structural damage. Doors are being ripped right off their hinges, and windows, walls, and roofs of homes, restaurants, and hotels are being stripped away by the storm's incredible power.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:19PM (4 children)
They're bilingual in the sense that in theory I can program in COBOL, but in reality that ain't happening. I met the cream of their crop in the military at a somewhat competitive school (for them to attend, anyway) and they're pretty good at the "attention" "parade rest" "about face" "dismissed" type of English and they knew all the swear words, but their general fluency was somewhat lacking beyond that point. I suppose there's humility issues, I could claim I'm bilingual because I took Spanish in high school decades ago and I still remember how to ask politely for a beer in Spanish, but I'm not "really" bilingual. In that same sense PRs that I know, are bilingual but not "really" bilingual.
That lack of fluency made the school somewhat challenging for them. And these were the best guys in the entire PR National Guard, implying...
It was essentially a sys admin class, I would imagine some training you can get by monkey see monkey do style but this class took some reading. This was one of those classes with a 100% pass rate so I can't state what they really learned or didn't learn.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NewNic on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:57PM (1 child)
... that they hadn't been chosen for their fluency in English? That other skills were considered more important?
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:00PM
... being non-white.
(Score: 2) by Spook brat on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:22PM (1 child)
I'll dispute the assertion that your classmates were the best of the PR NG. The ones I trained with had no issues with fluency whatsoever, and had less of an accent than at least two of our classmates from the mainland. I was not in a 100% pass program; the instructors were free to fail out anyone they felt couldn't cut it, resulting in the trainee being reassigned to a different specialty.
NewNic already suggested that perhaps they were being selected for a different set of skills; I'm sure your buddies in signals class were plenty smart with computers and electronics, it takes a different kind of smart to make it in HUMINT. I'll stop short of saying that that any of the intel/comms specialties attract a better class of people, despite my personal biases.
;)
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 22 2017, @01:07AM
Although it superficially appears to be battle of anecdotes, with respect to the original claim of universal bilingualism...
That is a good point that I don't know how TOEFL was balanced against ASVAB. The Army has mysterious ways...