In most contemporary societies, including the United States, there are really no provisions, practices, and doctrines to handle a large city's worth of people's disruption of daily routine. We've seen this with Katrina and Sandy, but more recently with Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

Puerto Rico's situation is worse because of several compounding factors that work against them: the scale of the disaster, communication and coordination issues, logistical challenges, and a belligerent rhetoric coming from the topmost levels of the US federal government despite lower-level federal employees being part of of a burgeoning, although so far inadequate recovery effort.

But in each of these disasters, the hard questions to which society offers zero answers begin long before the disaster actually strikes. Universities and research organizations have long studied reasons why people don't evacuate, and while discretionary answers exist, many people simply report being unable to afford the expenses of a temporary relocation away from one's regular job for a disaster that's forecasted to perhaps occur 3-5 days out.

You can invoke the argument that it's literally a matter of life and death and that ought to be worth any expense, but that's not helpful when people may not have cash on hand, or quick access to easy emergency credit that would be guaranteed by some higher party. It's truly unfortunate that situation is that disaster aid for forecastable disasters only kicks in once it has already struck, and not days before when its inevitability becomes clear.

In Puerto Rico's current case, the breakdown of societal structures due to lack of electricity, lack of electronic communication, lack of fuel, lack of distribution capability is unfortunate enough, but the degenerate functioning of life is just bizarre; people are now trying to get by in a worst-of-both-worlds hybrid of subsistence tribalism and wage-earning capitalism, where they both have to forage for food and water and barter for supplies, while at the same time giving the rest of their cash-on-hand to large corporations like CVS for stuff that's still on the shelves; and any changes to this status quo are reliant on random individuals' goodwill -- like a shopowner who decides to give away supplies -- instead of any organized directives from top-down.