Who's to Blame?

It's a question we can't help but ask ourselves, even if we know it's fruitless:

Katrina was the third most-intense hurricane to ever hit the United States. It will definitely be the third most deadly, with a shot at the #2 slot (or even, God help us, #1). It will undoubtedly be the most expensive. Either the destruction of the Gulf Coast or the loss of New Orleans would have vied for the title of worst natural disaster in American history. But we got them both within 24 hours.

Yes, local emergency services were totally overwhelmed. But consider Frank Martin's thoughtful post on the matter:

Does it occur to those of you that are blaming the mayor and the New Orleans police department that the very people you are castigating for a “lack of leadership” also lost everything in the disaster? The people everyone counted on to have the plans and to be on the job afterwards were also wiped out in this disaster. This is not a simple high water mark on some rich folks barrier island vacation homes; this is the utter destruction of 4 major cities. [snip]

Stop thinking of this as a Hurricane and start thinking of this as an atomic bombing and you can start to see what happened here was just beyond anyone local to have the ability to deal with it. The hurricane didn’t just destroy the buildings; it destroyed the authority and the infrastructure of local government as well.

The lesson here is that in true large scale disasters, you can’t count on the locals to even be there to take the lead. The assumption has to be that the locals are gone and cannot take part in their own rescue. That is not an assumption we make today in our planning, all disaster planning says the locals “drive the show”. Katrina showed the weakness in that idea. Katrina changed the paradigm of disasters in our memory. I always wondered what would take the place of 9/11 in my nightmares, and now I know what it is.

This is undeniably true. America has traditionally depended on local government to plan for and respond to disasters. The plan was implemented. It just didn't begin to be enough.

It's a waste of time to assign blame now. There will be congressional hearings, probably a full-blown independent inquiry, to spread the blame around later It's also useless to tell the people trapped in New Orleans and all along the coast that their mayor should have had a better plan or that they should have evacuated. Local government failed. We can talk about why later. Right now, people are looking to Washington.

Americans have a very low tolerence for disorganization. We see old people and children with out water, we get upset. We see it in America, we get angry. That may not be rational given the stats I cited above, but that's the way it is. The time for Bush to take control of the relief effort was yesterday, federalism be damned. Save the people now, let the lawyers work out the details later. I just hope that has already happened and we'll be seeing the results soon... real soon.

Update: Looks like things have started to happen. Hopefully, this convoy just the beginning.

Update: Oh yeah, there's gonna be plenty of blame to go around.