Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Opinion columnist

Things are pretty bad in Puerto Rico. As Terry Teachout commented, the situation — no electricity, limited transportation, shortages of food and water — is what the United States would look like after a successful North Korean electro-magnetic pulse attack on our grid.

This has led to the usual political finger-pointing. The press has been trying to make every hurricane this year into “Trump’s Katrina,” for obvious reasons, but the problem here isn’t presidential. As former Navy Captain and disaster-relief expert Jerry Hendrix told Bloomberg View:

Puerto Rico is an island that suffers from its position in the middle of the Caribbean and its physical separation from the U.S. Its roads were in disrepair and its electrical grid was antiquated prior to the hurricane. The island has also suffered for years from ineffective local government and rising local territorial debt. The Navy used to operate a large Navy base there, Naval Station Roosevelt Roads. I spent six months on the island in 1993, but when the island’s population protested the presence of the training range at nearby Vieques Island, the Navy shuttered the base, taking $300 million a year out of the Puerto Rican economy.

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If that Navy base were still there, there’d be a lot more help already on the scene. But as Hendrix notes, it’s not like the administration didn’t do anything to prepare:

First of all, there was a fair amount of anticipatory action that is not being recognized. Amphibious ships, including the light amphibious carriers Kearsarge and Wasp and the amphibious landing ship dock Oak Hill were at sea and dispatched to Puerto Rico ahead of the hurricane’s impact. These are large ships that have large flight decks to land and dispatch heavy-lift CH-53 helicopters to and from disaster sites. They also have big well-decks — exposed surfaces that are lower than the fore and aft of the ship — from which large landing craft can be dispatched to shore carrying over 150 tons of water, food and other supplies on each trip. These are actually the ideal platforms for relief operations owing to their range of assets.

But Puerto Rico is an island. The long lines of utility trucks and semi-trailers full of supplies that streamed into the areas of Texas and Florida hit by hurricanes Harvey and Irma can’t drive to Puerto Rico. Everything that gets there has to come in by air and sea, and couldn’t even do that until airports and seaports, damaged by the storm, were up and running, which took a while. Plus, as Hendrix notes, Puerto Rico’s infrastructure and government are nowhere near as robust and effective as is the case in Texas and Florida.

Worse yet, Maria was the second hurricane to hit Puerto Rico, and the third to hit the United States in the space of a few weeks, and many U.S. government assets were already committed elsewhere.

That means recovery is going to be slower no matter what. Relief officials on the island say that aid is getting to the ports now, but the problem is distribution, with most truck drivers unable to get to work because of the destruction.

“It’s a lack of drivers for the transport trucks, the 18-wheelers," Col. Michael Valle, who is in charge of the Hurricane Maria relief efforts,toldThe Huffington Post. "There are ships full of supplies, backed up in the ports, waiting to have a vehicle to unload into. However, only 20% of the truck drivers show up to work. These are private citizens in Puerto Rico, paid by companies that are contracted by the government.”

Politicians and pundits will do what they can to wring partisan advantage out of the fact — see the tweet-fight between Trump and San Juan's mayor — but that’s just because that’s what they do.

So what lessons can we take from this experience? First, it pays to have sturdy infrastructure and effective local government. Texas and Florida have those; Puerto Rico lacks them (as did New Orleans, for that matter, at the time of Katrina).

Trump’s a builder, so he’ll probably be willing to get behind a big infrastructure upgrade for Puerto Rico, though for that — and for the financial bailouts the island commonwealth has been seeking since long before hurricane season — there needs to be some accountability on the part of the local politicians who created the mess, and better supervision in the future.

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For the rest of us, well, we should all do our best to be sure that the places where we live have sturdy infrastructure and effective local government. And perhaps we need to invest more in disaster preparation. Puerto Rico should have kept a big stock of emergency supplies distributed around the island, so that food, water and medicine, for at least the first week or two’s needs, wouldn’t have to be transported very far. (Even in downtown Manhattan, after the 9/11 attacks, it was four days before the federal authorities showed up.)

And that also means that we need to encourage the spirit of the Cajun Navy. Don’t just wait for help. Be the help. Because there’s one group of people who are first on the scene at any disaster, and that’s the people who were already there. As I’ve said here before, encouraging people to prepare, and respond, to disasters themselves is the single most important thing we can do to prepare. That’s a lesson not only from Puerto Rico, but from pretty much every other disaster we’ve had.

Disaster planners who once encouraged civilians to get out of the way are now getting behind what they call “whole community response.” I think it’s time to double down on that, across America.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.