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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

CNN is doing live shots every hour.

Hard to say how much of the island they are covering, they are there.

It's also been nearly a week. In all fairness though, it seems like the airports are either shut down or operating at greatly reduced capacity, so it's hard for reporters to get in.

I saw an article earlier today about how hard it’s going to be to rebuild the electric grid (effectively REPLACE it because it’s 80% gone) that said that for at least a while the airport didn’t have radar and flights had to be confirmed for landing before they could even take off which was adding a massive delay to any attempt to get to the island.

> "how hard it’s going to be to rebuild the electric grid..."

- ~80% of transmission lines are down

- >90% of distribution lines are down

- Fuel for their generation plants is desperately needed and needs to be shipped in on a regular basis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico_Electric_Power_Aut...)

Basically, from an electrical-grid-restoration perspective ("Blackstart"), its a nightmare.

The military isn't giving up seats on military flights to members of Congress today because they need the space for vital supplies and personnel, which is one measure of how hard it is to get into PR right now.

At this point I wonder if it would make more sense to fly into the Dominican Republic and then take a boat.

I just got out of PR Tuesday. I tried to get a ferry to DR to do this exact thing in reverse to get into the mainland and was informed the ferries are all out of service.

Many people have been sleeping in the airport. On the floor. For days.

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