Commander of Hurricane Katrina Response: ‘Puerto Rico Is Bigger than Katrina’

EXCERPT:

HONORE: "In Hurricane Irma, we had an aircraft carrier that came over the horizon and it could have run all of the air in and out of Puerto Rico. The second day they could have had an AWACS above running the airfield in Puerto Rico 24-7. The military has the capacity to do this. And the next time I'm going to see senators McCain and Graham, we're going to create a damn law that the next time we have a hurricane season, Department of Defense needs to be prepared to handle three back-to-back category 4 storms and we maneuver on those storms just like we did in Florida. Florida was a textbook operation. General Calhoun put his guard in and the federal troops came in by sea and by air and it was a textbook operation. It was a difficult operation. We needed even more than that. Scale up, Wolf. They need to scale up in Puerto Rico. In Katrina I had 20,000 federal troops. Not federal workers, federal troops. I had 20 ships and over 240 helicopters and Puerto Rico is bigger than Katrina."