Hey, respectfully, “they” is “we”. I live in Puerto Rico and went through the storms, and worse, their aftermath.
I prepared. My business prepared. My neighbors prepared. We fared quite well in our area and supported each other, without waiting for the government. That was the case for most if not all the people I know.
The local government collapsed for the first couple of weeks, completely, and was overwhelmed the rest of the time and almost a year later, it still is.
The federal government response was abundant. In fact, on the other side of overwhelming since they sent thousands of helpers, who took over virtually every hotel room and rental car, stalling for months the restart of our very important tourism industry.
But if the federal government help was abundant in materiel and personnel, it lacked in coordination and structure, and there was a lot of wasted time.
That’s the true story from my first-person perspective.
sorry- i was talking about the extreme partisan leadership there- not the people who suffered-
That needs to be provided from local authorities. It was the same problem with Katrina.
But if the federal government help was abundant in materiel and personnel, it lacked in coordination and structure,
People being responsible for their own stuff tends to work better - even if they are getting aid from others.
...and the trucker’s using the disaster to give their strike leverage is beyond reprehensible. ...as well as additional varieties of opportunism.
The situation really, really sucked, but there were a lot of bad decisions locally each before, during and after. You are correct, of course, that there was a lot that was just too rough to reasonably plan for in a gross sense - like all the bridges down a river being gone, and all of the communications, fiber, and power that used to ride under them gone as well each in parallel and with repeated breaks along the path. There were, however some basic elements of planning which failed to even happen, like not putting ALL of the power plants on the ocean-front, and not having organizations set up to haul the goods that completely clogged the docks so that off-loading completely stopped.
On the other hand, I seem to remember a statistic that at one point most of the portable power units in the world were in PR by early this year.