COMMENTARY
Guam needs our help to recover

By Howard Green
Honolulu attorney

The situation in Guam is worse than awful, and the people of Guam and Rota are going to need help from Hawai'i on a sustained basis.

As a businessman and lawyer who has done a lot of business in Guam over the years, I have been in contact with a number of people, including the governor's office.

There are about 3,300 people in shelters, but latest estimates by the Federal Emergency Management Agency are that 32,000 people have been displaced by damage to their residences — nearly 20 percent of the island's population.

The most serious problem is still that the petroleum fire at the tank farm in Guam's harbor has made it impossible to get gasoline, so people can't go to work or go to the market, and even recovery assessment efforts have been hampered by lack of gas to fuel vehicles needed for that work.

Many emergency generators around the island have not been operating because there are no vehicles to deliver the fuel they need to operate.

Five days after the tragedy, no one has electricity, and few have water. Serious public health issues are going to arise very soon.

Economy devastated

FEMA has been concentrating rightly on need assessments and meeting emergency needs such as providing temporary medical help until Guam Memorial Hospital can get back in service. There are still hundreds of injured individuals who have yet to receive adequate treatment.

Furthermore, many long-term care patients in Guam are facing a serious lack of facilities to provide for them.

In the government and general population, no one is back at work, and there are no estimates yet as to when it will be possible for recovery efforts to begin.

When Guamanians get back to work, they are going to begin feeling the full effects of the storm.

Essentially, the Guam economy is driven by tourism; but almost every major hotel has sustained such serious damage that it will not be accepting guests for an undetermined length of time. Tourism not only drives the hotels and other businesses, but also directly supports Guam's government and economy.

Few resources

The government presents a special problem. Revenues were suffering from a serious economic downturn before the typhoon last July, which left the government in difficult straits.

Even before the most recent storm, the government barely had money to make payroll, and many other bills are long overdue. Without tourism, and with the huge income tax deductions related to the storm, government revenues are going to fall to a trickle.

Whereas disasters commonly cause serious hardship, this one is likely to leave the Guam economy in such collapse that recovery may not be possible without massive help that goes well beyond the kind that FEMA normally is authorized to provide.

We in Hawai'i have a special relationship with Guam, and need to get ourselves organized to provide meaningful help. It's Christmas, and we can only pray that the Christmas spirit will help us do what we can to ease the difficulties Guamanians are going to face in the coming weeks and months.