Key details about electricity and drinking water availability in Puerto Rico have been deleted from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) website.
FEMA’s website, which had been tracking the “federal response” to the island territory’s recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Maria, previously showed that 50 percent of Puerto Rico’s residents had access to drinking water and 5.4 percent of residents had electricity, as of Wednesday.
On Thursday, however, those statistics vanished from the website, according to the Washington Post.
A FEMA spokesperson told the Post that those statistics are still available on a website maintained by Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rossello (you can find that website here). The website reports that as of Thursday evening 9.2 percent of the U.S. territory has power and 54.2 percent of residents have access to water.
“Our mission is to support the governor and his response priorities through the unified command structure to help Puerto Ricans recover and return to routines. Information on the stats you are specifically looking for are readily available,” William Booher, a spokesperson for FEMA, told the Post.
The Post suggests that the numbers available on FEMA’s website—federal workers on the ground, airports open, ports open, and more—help illustrate President Donald Trump’s claims that the federal government is working hard to restore Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the hurricane.
You can read the Washington Post’s report here.
