FEMA admits it failed Puerto Rico. Can it do any better?

The agency’s disorganization and a lack of supplies and personnel contributed to the havoc.

A report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency has now confirmed, in brutal detail, what has long been evident: Its response to the killer hurricanes that struck Puerto Rico last fall was chaotic and tragically inadequate.

Ten days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, and the island lay devastated, President Trump callously tweeted that the residents “want everything to be done for them.” So it is to FEMA’s credit that the agency has publicly acknowledged the disorganization and the woeful shortage of basic supplies and personnel that contributed to the havoc from which the island still suffers. It took days for the first barge of food and water to reach the island.

Frances Robles’s Times article about the report makes for chilling reading considering that Hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed 70,000 homes, left 3.3 million people without power and may have led to more than 4,500 deaths, often because of a lack of medical services. Thousands of Puerto Ricans still lack shelter or power, and tens of thousands are still unable to return from refuge in the states.

Yet as another hurricane season approaches, blame is less important than learning from failures. Last year’s storms were the most destructive on record, and climate change promises worse to come. As Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, correctly said, the after-action report “provides a transformative road map for how we respond to future catastrophic incidents.”

Among other things, wrote Brock Long, the FEMA administrator, all levels of government and individual families need to be much better prepared, especially in areas hard to reach in the immediate aftermath of a great storm. FEMA must take into account not only the logistical problems of dealing with devastation on islands like Puerto Rico, but also the possibility of multiple simultaneous disasters. When Hurricane Maria struck on Sept. 20, FEMA was already coping with the damage of Hurricane Irma in Florida, Texas and the United States Virgin Islands.

All of that is evident in the report, and should be acted on promptly by federal and local governments. There can be no excuse next time for the sort of incompetence and chaos that marked FEMA’s work on Puerto Rico. But there is another lesson that does not figure into FEMA’s account.

Many mainland Americans persist in regarding Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens. The condescension with which Puerto Rico is too often held was clearly behind President Trump’s downplaying the disaster and his complaints about the cost, and most likely behind the radically underreported casualties.

When the next killer storms strike, and they will, all Americans should be secure in the knowledge that their government, local and federal, will be there ready and able to help.