> I 'm sure that the future holds new kinds of
>disaster planning. Maybe they will not limit
>themselves to someone's idea of a "worst case
>senario." Sometimes the worst thing is beyond
>that.

The thing that I can't get over, moreso than the failure of FEMA and other disaster relief agencies to take control of the situation, is the fact that apparently New Orleans city government and Louisiana state government didn't already have some sort of plans and contingencies in place for something like this. This was GOING TO HAPPEN some day. This wasn't planes flying into buildings out of the blue. This wasn't a freak storm in a place that doesn't usually get them, or a freak earthquake in a normally non-earthquake zone. This was freaking New Orleans, a city mostly UNDER SEA LEVEL, built right near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where hurricanes hit every single year. This is certainly a tragedy, but it was also an INEVITABLE tragedy. It was going to happen at some point, and the fact that local and state governments apparently had zero contingency plans in place to deal with it seems ludicrous to me.

It takes more than a week to stockpile food and medecine enough for a big city. It takes more than a week to create logistical plans concerning what you're going to do in the event of a big storm and busted levees. But these plans shouldn't have been started just a week ago, either. This city in particular should have had some sort of contingency plan for this years and years ago.

Maybe hindsight is 20/20. But come on, this was a completely inevitable event. It was GOING TO HAPPEN at some point, a mathematical certainty that the area would suffer a direct hit from a huge storm and be flooded. And the best that could be done were haphazard evacuation orders, completely unprepared law enforcement agencies, and apparently no disaster management contingencies. It's mind boggling.

-- Dave