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It is indeed sad, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on September 16, 2017 and three months later more than half of the island population was still without power and many people are still without access to potable water, a safe food supply and a method to transact other than cash. To be distributed water must be pumped, and pumps need electricity. Battery technology will not last for three months, stored value chip cards are almost non-existent in the USA, our Debit and Credit cards are online Chip and Signature (mostly). When grid power is down, no amount of generators are going to cut it because power is used to dispense fuel. No generator or transport can run, because batteries cannot be recharged, and petroleum based fuels cannot be distributed.  

How many miles can you drive with a single charge of your electric car, 250km? Then what?

Looking for a use case study for retaining cash, look to Puerto Rico.

My suggestion to SWIFT would be to implement a system using the card network PCI model. Institutions with low Dollar transfers could self certify, while high Dollar institutions would be externally audited.  This would pass the cost of an breach on to the Financial Institution that breaches minimum standards, which might put that FI out of business. A certified institution, might be able to mitigate the risk by having the SWIFT community accept some of the liability of a breach.

There is a realistic chance of this succeeding as long as they can keep to political class at arms length.