Donald J. Trump, as is his habit, told a serious lie when looking back on the administration’s response to Hurricane Maria’s devastating attack on Puerto Rico.
He called it an “unsung success,” which it wasn’t. It was a disastrous display of incompetence.
So … now the administration is preparing for another monstrous storm. Hurricane Florence is bearing down on the Carolina coast. Federal emergency management officials have ordered evacuations along Atlantic coasts of North and South Carolina.
The president said this week that “we’re ready” for the storm to make landfall. It will land likely as a Category 4 monster, packing winds of 150 mph, producing storm surges exceeding a dozen feet and bringing as much as 2 feet of rainfall.
We’re about to see just how well the government can respond to Mother Nature’s wrath. In a curious sense, we’ll also get to compare this response to what the president described as a glowing success a year ago when Hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico.
I damn sure want the government to deliver on its promise of being “ready” for this storm, even if its response to Hurricane Florence reveals where the feds fell short in the Caribbean.
The nation is hoping for the best.
No one can predict the outcome of a Hurricane. No matter what steps you take to prepare, you can’t predict what “Will” happen. Puerto had some successes and some failures. As a politician, you capitalize on your successes and try and fix your failures before the next catastrophe. You lived in Amarillo. Can anyone predict how bad a storm or range fire out here will be, or how prepared we really are, when a catastrophic event occurs. And sometimes our responses don’t measure up. But what ever the response, it will be all we can do.