With the President finally defaulting to the blame the victim mentality it’s important to point out how Harvey and Irma were different from Maria. While I don’t have a ton of direct knowledge of the Irma response I lived the Harvey storm and response, which is still ongoing.
Federal presence where Harvey actually made landfall is fairly light. FEMA’s main effort was setting up a tent city for folks who had nowhere else to go. They did so on an airfield in Corpus Christi and a golf course on the North Shore of Corpus Christi Bay closer to the landfall of the storm.
The storm made landfall in an area whose dominant feature is a wildlife refuge and a half dozen towns of less than 10,000 people each. While Corpus Christi got hurricane force winds and most of town lost power there were not structure collapses. The worst I saw in Corpus was a collapsed gas station canopy and a house that burned down the night of the storm. Power was fully back on in a week and some parts of town never lost it. Power crews were in position the night of the storm from across the state and country. They were out at 5am getting power back for the hospitals.
In other words the 60,000 people directly in the path of the storm have had a fully functional city of 300,000 people half an hour away by car across flat highways that weren’t obstructed to begin with. I got power back the day after the storm and had an older woman from Rockport staying in my house who would wake up at 5am go work at her house until 2pm and come back to take a nap in air conditioning. I DVRed her shows for her to watch every night.
All of the regional businesses like banks, retailers, and hospitals shifted resources and people to the volunteer and recovery efforts. A banker I know barbecued for a week for volunteers. My wife’s mommy workout group volunteered serving lunch instead of doing their workouts. You get the idea.
On top of that they weren’t dealing with full populations. At least half of these towns had evacuated inland so you didn’t have many sick or disabled people for the limited local resources to deal with. Any that were left quickly got moved somewhere they could be cared for. The State sent extra law enforcement. Statewide companies sent their mobile units. HEB the major grocer for instance has generators for all it’s stores(which include pharmacies) and had a mobile pharmacy with a generator it plopped down in the center of the affected area.
Puerto Rico is different. There is no safe fully functional staging area for people to evacuate to, get supplies from or take a break in. There’s no city accessible by car where you can go check into a hotel room. No hospital you can transfer people to by ambulance.
If you can’t get the most vulnerable out the able bodied who you need for recovery go into survival mode of trying to protect their family and friends. Labor you can organize goes into immediate life saving measures rather than investing that labor into returning things to normalcy. Only an organized push of labor from the outside can break that cycle and on an island 1000 miles away that’s only the military. This isn’t Katrina with tens of thousands of people stuck at the Superdome, it’s a couple million people. It’s at least an order of magnitude bigger.
They needed to get the airport open and start putting sick people on planes out. They needed to get word out to all the Mayors to clear a landing zone and mark it so it can be viewed from the air and drop supplies and a coordinator with a radio and basic supplies at every one of them then use the radio to place orders for what is specifically needed. Supplies in, evacs out. As you stabilize food, water and shelter you start clearing the roads, restoring water, restoring power.
The reality is that the Federal response to the earlier storms wasn’t nearly as strong as many thought. You may have noticed the Cajun Navy was pulling people out of Houston way before the Helicopters showed up. In this case the people who would be the Puerto Rican version of the Cajun Navy are trying to get medication for their parents and so aren’t out there in skiffs embarrassing the Federal government into action.