When local bureaucrats put caps on prices, they create more shortages. All this is folly. Businessmen will always charge as high a price as they can get away with, whether in the midst of disaster or not. Those market forces are always in place, and especially so after a disaster. Businessmen know there are needs to be met, and rush in, sometimes from afar, to provide them.
Entrepreneurs spend their lives looking for unmet needs they can satisfy.
But these providers have to compete with each other, a process which results in prices that are neither too high, which would lead to under-utilization, nor too low, which would lead to waste. If government intervenes by mandating artificially low prices, it conveys misleading information to consumers, causing them to use more than they should of scarce resources, and making existing shortages more intractable. If capitalists didn't benefit, it wouldn't make economic sense for them to provide people with what they want. The other beneficiaries, who seem somehow forgotten, are the people with whom the capitalists make their exchanges. It's not only local government that impedes market adjustment.