The Mayor of San Juan Puerto Rico is mad as hell about what she calls the inefficiency of the Trump administration’s response to the disaster wreaked on the island after Hurricane’s Irma and Maria decimated the tiny island in recent weeks. Many across the country have accused Trump of ignoring the scale of the crisis and the promptness (or lack thereof) of their response. Victory Girl Martha Hernandez wrote about it here.

When I watch the video of Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz above all I can think of is Ronald Reagan’s famous line “The nine most frightening words in the English language are “I’m here from the Government and I am here to help.” Clearly, that is the experience that Ms. Yulin Cruz and her people are living presently. According to Ms. Cruz private companies are stepping up to the plate offering food and water well before the Federal government. Goya, a company which specializes in Latin American foods, donated over 200,000 pounds of food to be distributed to people on the small island. The command of the troops responding to the disaster was originally handled by a one-star Army general. Yesterday, however, Lt. General Jeffrey Buchanan, a three-star Army general was named by the Pentagon as the gentleman who will be heading up relief efforts for Puerto Rico going forward. His mission is to improve the distribution of supplies on the island.

It has been a week of tough criticism from all corners as retired Lt. General Russell Honore, who headed up the response to Hurricane Katrina, criticized the administration’s response as well. The retired military officer did not hold back when asked if the situation in Puerto Rico is worse than what he had dealt with in Katrina, in an article from CBS.

“”Oh, hell yeah,” Honore said. “The number one priority is saving lives and when you’re saving lives, you’ve gotta figure out what rules you’re gonna break. All the rules we live by are designed for peacetime.

“And this is what?” Miller asked.

“This is like a war,” he said.

“What was their first mistake?” Miller asked.

“Not giving the mission to the military,” Honore said. “Look, we got Army units that go do port openings. Not called. We got special forces that could’ve been in every town. Not employed.”

“Has the U.S. government done anything right? Did they learn lessons from Katrina?” Miller asked.” “They did the pre-deployment. That was good. They got an all-of-government approach. That’s good. But they don’t understand scale,” he said.”

As someone who works with major projects I can tell you that scalability is everything.  So far the military response has been to put  4,900 Army soldiers and Army Corps of Engineers civilian personnel in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. They have sent thirty aircraft and more than 500 trucks that are committed as well. The National Guard projects 1,400 guard forces will be deployed to the island in the coming week. Though that sounds like a sizable response to me, if they cannot distribute goods well once they get there, and according to Ms. Yulin Cruz they have not been able to, what good does it do the citizens of Puerto Rico?

As I see these heart-rending images and listen to the raw frustration in the mayor’s voice I have to ask myself, how could we have better positioned a response to this unparalleled disaster? And in the end, how are we ever going to pay to get this island back on its feet?