For the more than five million Puerto Ricans living on the United States mainland, it was bad enough to watch news reports on Wednesday of Hurricane Maria ripping through an island where relatives and friends lived. What made it worse was not knowing how their loved ones had fared. Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said in a statement that the hurricane’s impact on the island’s communications infrastructure had been “catastrophic,” and that the commission was trying to help. Some services, like texting and a few internet messaging apps, were reported to be working, but not consistently. He also noted that Puerto Ricans were old hands when it came to surviving devastating storms.

Source: New York Times September 21, 2017 23:44 UTC