Supplies headed to Puerto Rico had one less obstacle to face on Thursday, but the aggravating reality of a supply chain breakdown was increasingly clear: thousands of crates carrying supplies and water sit idly on the island’s ports with no truck drivers to move them.

Bloomberg reports that the supplies include millions of emergency meals.

CBS correspondent David Begnaud was among the first to report what he describes as more than 3,000 shipping containers sitting on a port waiting to be shipped to people in desperate need of relief.

“This is unbelievable,” Begnaud said. “I literally said to somebody, ‘what’s on there?’ and they said whatever you need, emergency supplies, anything a grocery store would need. But it’s just sitting here. The reason why? People aren’t showing up to pick it up.”

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President Donald Trump on Thursday eased rules that limited vessels with shipments from going into Puerto Rico — a 1920s maritime law known as the Jones Act — but journalists and officials on the ground said a lack of fuel and damaged roads are making it difficult to get supplies to those who need them.

Related: Trump waives Jones Act. Here's what that does, how it will help Puerto Rico in crisis

It’s been just over a week since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico with wind speeds of up to 200 mph. U.S. and Puerto Rico officials have been urging Trump to send troops and assistance as quickly as possible. That list includes Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, who on Thursday called on Trump to allow the Department of Defense to step in and help with what he called “the main problem”: logistics on the ground.

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The Pentagon responded hours later saying that it would send a three-star general to manage relief logistics in Puerto Rico, Fox News reported.

But as days go by, frustration appeared to be turning in to life-and-death feelings of desperation, chiefly around the inability to transport supplies.

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CNBC correspondent Contessa Brewer said there were some 9,500 containers that remained idle on the port. Brewer said she asked one port executive in an interivew, “Look, does seeing this make you mad?”

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“It makes me sad and frustrated,” Jose Pache Ayala, an executive with Crowley Puerto Rico, told Brewer. “Just to see that we have all these goods and that people are out there begging, anxious in the need of such important supplies and they are all sitting here in this yard.”

The problem rests largely with the island’s short supply of fuel, diesel, for drivers to get to work, Brewer reported. Others said there is also a lack of coordination and bureaucratic entanglements causing holdups. Island officials said they would recruit any truck drivers with a valid license who would show up.

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On the island of 3.4 million people, more than 1.5 million still have no power after 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s transmission lines were damaged by the storm. Ninety percent of cellular phone service is also down and 42 percent of the people are still without potable water, the Federal Emergency Management Agency reported.

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