Photo by PRONOAA Photo Library | CC BY 2.0
Irma is battering its way towards South Florida, where it will be the most powerful hurricane to strike the state since Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Aid for victims of Andrew was infamously slow to arrive and chaotically distributed when it finally turned up. Federal and state authorities waiting for Irma say that they learned their lesson from mistakes made then, and that nothing like that could happen again.
I doubt that: 10 days after Andrew, I was in Homestead, a devastated town 20 miles south of Miami, where I was warmly greeted by local people who initially thought I was an insurance adjuster or a government official come to help them. They were only a little less welcoming when I explained that I was a British journalist, since their expectations of speedy government assistance were realistically low.
Where aid had arrived, it was almost comically out of keeping with local needs. US army officers were frustrated because they had erected 125 tents, each capable of sheltering 30 people whose houses were uninhabitable, but the survivors were resolutely refusing to live in them.
Instead, they were camping in the wreckage of their houses, explaining that if they moved out then their furniture and anything else they owned would be stolen by looters. The army was only allowing people to bring three suitcases each into their camp, which consequently remained entirely empty.
Another reason why people could not be shifted from the…