Disaster Expert: FEMA’s Response in Puerto Rico Even Better Than in Texas and Florida

Former Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Tevi Troy told Breitbart News: Sunday Edition that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had actually done an even better job managing Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico than it had in dealing with Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida recently.

“I’ve been looking into this pretty carefully,” Troy said. “The truth is that FEMA — if you look at this in retrospect, we may find that FEMA did a more Herculean task, in some ways in Maria, in terms of the distance they had to travel, the amount of logisitcs they had to bring, and the propping up of the local response effort. So I think in time we may actually praise FEMA to some degree because they had to do more here than in the Harvey situation.”

Troy, who served in the White House under President George W. Bush, is an expert on the history of presidential responses to disasters. He is the author of Shall We Wake the President?: Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office, and wrote an op-ed in late August in which he praised President Donald Trump’s response to Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana. “Mr. Trump’s handling of the hurricane response thus far is to be commended,” he wrote, adding — prophetically, given the storms that followed — “this is no time for complacency.”

With Hurricane Maria, Troy noted, FEMA faced additional hurdles. One was that Maria was only the latest in a string of devastating storms, so that the agency was suffering from some amount of “exhaustion.” In addition, FEMA faced several unique challenges in Puerto Rico:

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