Katrina

It's been long enough now that we can begin to see the shape of the political disaster that followed the hurricane. A few obvious points:

• If you build city below sea level, you should plan for the worst.

• The city, in particular the mayor of New Orleans, blew it. You don't call for the evacuation of a city and do almost nothing to make it work. There were hundreds of buses left unused. Traffic flow could have been improved by the simple expedient of using all but one of the lanes of the interstate highways for outgoing traffic. Obvious things were left undone.

• The governor of Louisiana blew it. Sometimes, you have to make decisions and adapt to reality. It appears she was unable to do either.

• FEMA is not a first-responder organization. It wasn't meant to be. Too many people think it is.

• FEMA is a seriously screwed-up organization. If cable news networks can manage communications from the disaster zone, it should be well within the capability of a federal agency. The agency arrived late, and if stories are to be believed its mismanagement made things worse.

• In the final analysis, people have to be prepared to take care of themselves and the people around them, at least until help arrives. It's not necessary to get as second mortgage and build a bomb shelter in the basement (although, if you have the cash, it's not the worst way to spend it). Just setting aside a few things may be enough. Look, for example, at this and this.

Anyone who says the flooding was "impossible to forsee" is an idiot or a liar (these are not mutually exclusive catagories). I spent a spring break in NO a few years ago as part of a service-learning group working in the area. The potential for catastrophe was obvious. It was commented upon, by visitors and by locals. It was the subject of jokes (a common reaction when people don't want to face difficult facts). The natural disaster that was Katrina was nothing more than the "worst-case scenerio" told to me by people in New Orleans all those years ago. Everyone knew the "hundred-year storm" was coming, but everyone hoped it wouldn't arrive in their lifetime. It was too easy to pass the buck. Nobody wanted to spend political (and financial) capital without a personal payoff. It was too easy to procrastinate in the hope that it would eventually become somebody else's problem. It was human. It was predictable. And now thousands of innocents pay.

Perhaps now somebody will recognize that the Department of Homeland Security was one of the worst bureaucratic disasters of the past fifty years. It was wrong in concept, wrong in design, and wrong in implementation.