There's also the concern of incentives. The authorities are incentivized to treat every emergency as requiring nothing over and above the standard response, because statistically this is correct. And so you would not expect the authorities to be able to recognize, or be honest about when an unfolding emergency requires an atypical response.
What do you mean by "standard response"? It seems to me that you have a working definition that is less an objective standard and more a subjective, circular definition of "anything that didn't fail."
Take Hurricane Harvey for example. The rain Houston received was record-breaking: ~30" in the course of a day or so, when the previous monthly record was 19". Does that require merely the "standard response"?
The Gulf of Mexico is no stranger to hurricanes, and Katrina and Maria don't even top out the strongest hurricanes on the list (that honor goes to Wilma). Hell, Katrina is only the third strongest hurricane of 2005. That's why the response was so heavily criticized: Katrina was essentially the hurricane that New Orleans' levees were designed for, a repeat of Hurricane Betsy a few days shy of 40 years earlier. Even the levee failures should have been scenarios that had been planned for in terms of disaster response.
If it requires a lot of response it's often because of failure to plan/build accordingly.
* Hurricane Isabel (5, 2003)
* Hurricane Charley (4, 2004)
* Hurricane Ivan (5, 2004)
* Hurricane Dennis (4, 2005)
* Hurricane Katrina (5, 2005)
* Hurricane Rita (5, 2005)
* Hurricane Wilma (5, 2005)
* Hurricane Ike (4, 2008)
* Hurricane Matthew (5, 2014)
* Hurricane Harvey (4, 2017)
* Hurricane Irma (5, 2017)
* Hurricane Maria (5, 2017)
* Hurricane Florence (4, 2018)
* Hurricane Michael (5, 2018)
* Hurricane Dorian (5, 2019)
That's 15 hurricanes. Of these, Katrina and Maria were the only ones where the response was considered botched. That's only 13%.