Sunday, January 28, 2018

PREPA Warehouse 5

A couple weeks ago there were reports about PREPA squirreling away parts and supplies in a Cataño warehouse. Big headlines: ARMED FEDERAL AGENTS RAID WAREHOUSE!!! and so forth.

Turns out that this was just more fake news. Yes, ARMED!!! federal agents did go to the warehouse but pretty much all federal agents are armed so there is nothing unusual about this. It does works as a headline to get people spun up, though.

El Nueva Dia went to investigate (Good for you, END, for doing your job properly) and here is what they found:
 

PREPA “Warehouse 5" was no secret

The public corporation attributes federal intervention to a communication problem

Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - 10:05 AM

...
However, the Director of Transmission and Distribution of PREPA, José Sepúlveda Aponte, showed this newspaper documents that prove that, shortly after the passage of hurricane María, crews from PREPA and from private companies hired by the public corporation, as well as the Corps of Engineers, started looking for materials at that warehouse.
"All the new metal (transmission) towers that have been installed came from warehouse 5. It is the only warehouse with that material," he said.

Between September and October, about 200 requests were made, mostly by PREPA crews, according to the logbook shown to this newspaper. There are also entries made by Whitefish and Cobra companies.

As of October 28, there are entries of private crews hired by the Corps of Engineers, such as one made by Flour-Pike on October 28 for works on line 36800 in Canóvanas. There is also an entry on November 11 for that same line.

Meanwhile, on November 18 a crew of the New York Power Authority, also subcontracted by the Corps of Engineers, appears. In another document he highlighted that Fluor was also in the warehouse in December, as well as Con Edison.

There was no information available about entries made after December.
...

https://www.elnuevodia.com/english/english/nota/prepawarehouse5wasnosecret-2390311/

Read the whole thing. My guess is that this was a political "SWATing" designed to gin up controversy. Much like the fake controversy that was ginned up over Whitefish.

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