Up to now, I’ve been pretty easy on Trump’s Puerto Rico relief policy. After all, Hurricane Maria is not his fault. Neither is the unique combination of geographical and historical circumstances that makes this a truly unprecedented relief effort, one for which we have no prior experience ready to guide us. The usual techniques we have developed for natural disaster relief just don’t seem to apply here. The island is large, and has a very large population. It has both urban and rural communities, and rough terrain not easily accessible by ground transport even under ideal conditions.

It is isolated, a long way off. But most important, its not just the extent of the damage that is an issue, it is the depth. The island’s entire infrastructure is crippled, road transport, air fields, ports, power grids, emergency services, communications, fuel delivery, even broadcasting. Nothing works, and everything is interconnected. Each casualty cannot be repaired individually and then integrated gradually into the others, as is the case in disaster recovery here in the States. Everything will have to fixed simultaneously, and everything brought online at once.

There are emergency supplies piling up at the ports, but there is no way to get them inland. The roads are washed out, flooded, or covered with debris. There are trucks, but they are scattered all over the island with no fuel to run them. There is no electric power to pump the fuel, no drivers to drive them (they are scattered all over too, with no transport available to get them to their jobs). The same can be said for the heavy equipment needed to clear those roads. And a very large number of homes are destroyed and people are sheltering in public buildings, in appalling conditions that worsen by the day. Food, water, and medical care are in short supply and quickly diminishing. And those items have to be replaced every single day.

I’ve been in several hurricanes myself and I am ashamed now to recall how upset I was by having my access to a shower, a cooked meal, a hot cup of coffee or a clean change of clothes restricted for even a few days. When the power was out I couldn’t log on to the net, or watch the national news. But at least I had food, water and a bed to sleep in. These people are now faced with the real threat of disease, the removal of bodies from the street, rapidly increasing street crime, gouging from unscrupulous merchants (that is, for those who have any cash on hand at all). Its been over a week now, with little or no relief in sight. In a worse case scenario, this could become a disaster on the scale of a Bengali typhoon. Hundreds of thousands dead.

I have no doubt the emergency authorities, both local and Federal, are doing everything they can, but this situation could easily spiral out of control, and not necessarily from their alleged incompetence. This is an enormous catastrophe. This situation is going to require leadership, and decisive action, even ruthlessness, immediately. Well, we’re in luck. Isn’t this what business executives are supposed to excel at?

What would I do in Trump’s place? I’m no expert in emergency management, at least not on this scale, but I can speculate on what it might come to. Mobilizing major military and naval formations, temporarily nationalizing whole industries and commandeering their assets, emergency loans and deficit spending in the billions, martial law? For example, I might consider mobilizing all naval assets capable of delivering supplies and people to the island, as well as all their support units, and evacuating threatened civilians, flying jets off aircraft carries and replacing them with helicopters, drafting pilots and mechanics for the effort, and offering massive subsidies and salaries for volunteers, both individual and companies. Divert all military supply and logistic capability to a sustained relief effort, even if it means gutting the national defense. It would mean bouncing checks, printing money and handing out vouchers. It would be expensive, and probably highly inefficient, and it would be riddled with all sorts of graft and corruption. It can’t be helped, it has to be improvised in a matter of days. But any savings will be paid in deaths. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives at stake. And these are Americans. Puerto Rico has over twice the population of Hawaii. Can you imagine what price we’d be willing to pay if Hawaii were devastated the way Puerto Rico was? And after the initial emergency comes the response and reconstruction, rebuilding the island so it can at least be self-supporting, and hopefully, not vulnerable to the next storm like Maria that comes along.

Its a tough job, an impossible one, actually; and no matter how well its done, it will never be as good as it has to be, and a lot of innocent people will still end up suffering. And a lot of people will be critical of the result. And we’ll all get stuck with the bill.

Mr Trump has his hands full. I just wonder if he is even aware of that.