Article from Reason by Eric Boehm.

As another major hurricane bears down on the United States, President Donald Trump has told reporters the federal government’s response to last year’s storm in Puerto Rico was “tremendous” and “one of the best jobs ever done.”

Almost on cue, pictures surfaced Tuesday night of what CBS News says is nearly a million bottles of water dumped at an airstrip in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico last September. By Wednesday morning, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) confirmed that, yes, those were bottles of water that never reached any of the stricken Puerto Ricans, more than 3,000 of whom died in the aftermath of the storm.

It’s unclear who exactly is to blame here, but there’s no doubt that the government screwed up. According to CBS, FEMA says it gave the water to the government of Puerto Rico, which failed to distribute it.

The images of all that wasted water sitting on a runway might be infuriating, but they’re sadly unsurprising. Given FEMA’s track record—which Reason‘s Joe Seyton explored in detail earlier this week—this is pretty much what we’ve come to expect in the wake of natural disasters.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Thief12 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons