Today (Sept. 28), the White House authorized the temporary waiving of a shipping regulation dating to nearly a century ago, known as the Jones Act, to enable much-needed aid to reach Puerto Rico.
Also known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act states that transportation of passengers or cargo between coastal points on U.S. soil — including districts and territories, such as Puerto Rico — is restricted to ships that were built in the United States, are U.S.-owned and fly the American flag, according to the Maritime Law Center.
The Jones Act waiver was issued in response to a direct appeal to the White House from Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted this morning, stating, "It will go into effect immediately."
In 1920, Washington Sen. Wesley L. Jones — after whom the Jones Act was named — outlined legislation to support and maintain an American merchant marine fleet that could compete with other shipping powerhouses around the world.
Helping or harming?
However, critics of the Jones Act have since argued that it may be hampering U.S. businesses by denying them access to a wider range of shipping resources.
It is also unclear if the Jones Act contributes significantly to national security by restricting foreign shipping, Grennes wrote in the study, noting that "there is no evidence to indicate that Jones Act requirements reduce terrorism in the United States."
McCain also tweeted today that since Congress had "finally" moved to suspend the law, members should consider repealing it, "to aid long-term recovery," he wrote.

DENVER – Nearly 100,000 cans of safe drinking water are being flown in to Puerto Rico, the US territory recently ravaged by Hurricane Maria.
Two local companies, Frontier Airlines and Oskar Blues Brewery, are teaming up with the CAN’d Air Foundation to provide some relief to residents.
Frontier expects to continue to deliver water via flights that depart from Denver International Airport and connect to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
According to the CAN’d Aid Foundation, 44 percent of Puerto Rico’s population is currently without drinking water.
The Category four hurricane blasted the island with devastating winds, rain and flooding that resulted in loss of power, services, contaminated and broken water supplies.
Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority officials stated that potable water won’t be available island-wide until power is restored, which could take months.
“We’re fortunate to be in a position to help,” stated Dale Katechis, Founder of CAN’d Aid Foundation and Oskar Blues Brewery.
“With the hard to reach nature of Puerto Rico we are in a unique position where we can partner with Oskar Blues and CAN’d Aid to provide quick delivery of safe and clean drinking water to the people of Puerto Rico,” said Frontier Spokesman Richard Oliver.
CAN’d Aid Foundation and Oskar Blues Brewery have distributed 433,000 cans of clean drinking water to those in need after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

DENVER – Nearly 100,000 cans of safe drinking water are being flown in to Puerto Rico, the US territory recently ravaged by Hurricane Maria.
Two local companies, Frontier Airlines and Oskar Blues Brewery, are teaming up with the CAN’d Air Foundation to provide some relief to residents.
Frontier expects to continue to deliver water via flights that depart from Denver International Airport and connect to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
According to the CAN’d Aid Foundation, 44 percent of Puerto Rico’s population is currently without drinking water.
The Category four hurricane blasted the island with devastating winds, rain and flooding that resulted in loss of power, services, contaminated and broken water supplies.
Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority officials stated that potable water won’t be available island-wide until power is restored, which could take months.
“We’re fortunate to be in a position to help,” stated Dale Katechis, Founder of CAN’d Aid Foundation and Oskar Blues Brewery.
“With the hard to reach nature of Puerto Rico we are in a unique position where we can partner with Oskar Blues and CAN’d Aid to provide quick delivery of safe and clean drinking water to the people of Puerto Rico,” said Frontier Spokesman Richard Oliver.
CAN’d Aid Foundation and Oskar Blues Brewery have distributed 433,000 cans of clean drinking water to those in need after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Gov. Ricardo Rosselló told CNN that crews are trying to restore water supplies for residents. But it hasn’t been easy.
"In terms of aqueducts, we have been able to restore only 50% of water, because the majority of water in Puerto Rico also depends on electric generators," he said on Wednesday.
Elí Díaz-Atienza, executive vice president for Puerto Rico’s Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, told San Juan-based WKAQ radio the island’s water facilities were significantly damaged during the hurricane. Díaz-Atienza said his water restoration plan includes using trucks to deliver water to residents in the island’s rural areas.
The CDC suggests boiling water, using disinfectants or a filtration system to sanitize water.
Although water and food supplies have been delivered to residents stranded on the island, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz told CNN more can be done.
The federal government, Long said, has established distribution sites and is conducting airlifts to distribute supplies.
But listen, we are not going to be able to move as fast as everybody would like us, or as I would like.

Gov. Ricardo Rosselló told CNN that crews are trying to restore water supplies for residents. But it hasn’t been easy.
"In terms of aqueducts, we have been able to restore only 50% of water, because the majority of water in Puerto Rico also depends on electric generators," he said on Wednesday.
Elí Díaz-Atienza, executive vice president for Puerto Rico’s Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, told San Juan-based WKAQ radio the island’s water facilities were significantly damaged during the hurricane. Díaz-Atienza said his water restoration plan includes using trucks to deliver water to residents in the island’s rural areas.
The CDC suggests boiling water, using disinfectants or a filtration system to sanitize water.
Although water and food supplies have been delivered to residents stranded on the island, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz told CNN more can be done.
The federal government, Long said, has established distribution sites and is conducting airlifts to distribute supplies.
But listen, we are not going to be able to move as fast as everybody would like us, or as I would like.

Gas for cars and generators is hard to find.
Communities across Puerto Rico have lost running water as a result of the widespread power outages from Hurricane Maria, and it’s not clear when it will be restored.
Many people are living off stockpiles, like Martha Viera and her daughter Veronica Vargas. They rode out the hurricane in their house on the top of a mountain ridge, near Aibonito in central Puerto Rico.
But Alberio says he needs water "for everything … to drink, to bathe, to wash up, to clean the house" so he traveled half an hour to this spring.
"There’s no water anywhere else," she says.
And other people in line here say they plan to use this water only for cleaning, not for drinking.
In Coamo, a small town in southern Puerto Rico that was hit hard by the storm, people lined up to take water from a municipal tank where it has been sitting stagnant for days.
Other people hop in to bathe.
"I lost everything in my house," he says.

Last week, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico as a powerful Category 4 storm, bringing with it 20 inches of rain and 155 mile-per-hour winds. Much of the island was devastated: Nearly all of the 3.4 million people on the island lost power, 80 percent of the agriculture was decimated, and the storm is responsible for 16 deaths so far.
About 1.5 million people—44 percent of the island—are without clean drinking water and are relying on water bottles or unsafe water sources for cleaning, drinking, and cooking.
“The lack of ability to treat the water means that the raw sewage and floodwaters can contaminate the drinking source,” says Erik Olson, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In 2015, 99.5 percent of Puerto Ricans got their water from systems that had violated the Safe Drinking Water Act, the federal law that regulates toxic chemicals in the US water supply; nearly 70 percent, or 2.4. million Puerto Ricans drank water from systems that had SDWA health violations.
Those countries could come with bottled water and filters.” Trump has lifted the shipping restrictions for 10 days; perhaps more supplies can reach desperate Puerto Ricans.
The pile is located in the southern region of the island, next to a low-income community.

When I was a young adult going to school in an urban area in the United States, I often heard about the scourge of the lack of proper education for the kids in our country: an often-quoted figure was the number of children who couldn’t pinpoint Europe on a map, or who thought that milk and eggs came from cartons at the grocery store.
Now that I’m a water professional I’ve been plagued by similar, grown-up versions of this worry: “What if today’s generation of kids thinks that water comes magically out of your tap when you turn a handle and that it just disappears down your toilet?” Hopefully anyone who’s passed a 5th grade science class knows that that’s not the case, but in the international water and sanitation sector we often fall into the trap of thinking in a similarly simplistic way – that providing water and sanitation to all is simply a matter of technology, and pipes, and some other hardware needed to clean our water enough and then once we’ve used it, spirit it away again to some place to begin the process all over again.
This strategy is being implemented through the collaborative efforts of UN Environment’s technical units, regional offices and collaborative centers, such as the Global Wastewater Initiative, which is managed by the GPA (the Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities), and the Global Environment Monitoring System, spearheading 30 years of work on water quality monitoring. Colleagues at the UNEP-DHI Partnership Centre on Water and Environment contribute their long-standing expertise on IWRM and data management, among many different areas, with the work being coordinated and technical expertise added by UN Environment’s Freshwater Ecosystems Unit at headquarters in Nairobi.
Figure 1.
In doing so, its aim is to promote human well-being, support inclusive growth, enhance environmental health and reduce risks while improving resilience (Figure 3).
Figure 2.
Find out more and get in touch with us at www.unep.org/ecosystems/freshwater.

Distressed by the pathetic state of a village in Dholpur district, devoid of basic infrastructure to sustain life, a medical student here has launched a campaign to improve the living conditions for about 350 villagers. As the village falls within the Municipal Council’s jurisdiction, it is deprived of the benefits of schemes designed for panchayats.
The lone government primary school has only a few students.
Ironically, the villagers living in the vicinity of the river have no access to clean drinking water. They drink highly polluted water directly from Chambal, where the animal carcasses can be seen floating.
Ashwani Parashar, a final year MBBS student in Sawai Man Singh Government Medical College here, told The Hindu on Wednesday that he was shocked to see the condition of Rajghat when he visited the village first time last year. “Seventy years after Independence, this village is covered in darkness and despair.
With this plea, he has moved a public interest litigation in the Rajasthan High Court, which has issued notices to the Chief Secretary and others.

“The whole island has been affected,” Rodríguez-Andino says.
From Washington, President Donald Trump has praised FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for a job well-done in Puerto Rico.
If the airport, the shipping ports and the roads are all damaged, she says the whole emergency response effort is going to slow down.
San Juan’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, told ABC News on Tuesday that FEMA officials in Puerto Rico are doing a good job. But she said people on the island are not getting what they need quickly enough.
“This is a complete rebuilding of an entire island of 3.4 million people” that is likely to take a decade or more to complete.