“There is not a storm that Satan can throw at this nation our righteous leader cannot prepare for”
The supply chains the government buys into are far less capable than those used by grocery store chains, Wal-Mart and Home Depot.
In Florida, for a Florida hurricane, I plan on the stores being out for a week, the power out for two and the debris being out for a month.
It took two months for the federal government contractors to remove the tree debris. The contractors used Bobcats to compress the debris and place it into trucks.
Most natural events are just too random and some are just overwhelming. You CAN do a lot as an individual to prepare for those extended outages. Hard for the government or the electrical company to have thousands of trucks on hand to fix downed power lines until after they can assess the damage.
It is one thing to evacuate and return to your undamaged home. Quite another to have a thousand electrical repair crews waiting just outside the zone and then realize the storm wasn’t as bad as predicted.
Heck - with Katrina you could have had 1,000 of crews available, and they would have needed to wait days/weeks for the water to go down anyway.
Think of any repair project around the home - you can be as prepared as possible for your Saturday project. Pipe, glue, new drain, wall board, etc. It still all takes time to replace that leaking pipe. And then of course when you see that the leak has been around for much longer than you thought, and the 2x4’s are rotted, and the 8”x12” beam has damage to it.
In California a year ago, people couldn’t move out fire debris without government approval and permits. If you did, you risked huge fines. Government wanted to keep hazardous stuff out of the landfill, but everything had been nicely incinerated.