re: I guess we will never know....
It was a local responsibility to prepare the people and the city for this and they, not the FED failed. I'm angry too but we are a republic and the locals are at fault.
All the controversy is raising the noise level so high it's difficult to communicate anything clearly. I only mentioned the Feds once, commenting on the nauseating spectacle of Chertoff and the FEMA guy congratulating themselves (and it wasn't humble, I mean CHertoff actually claimed they'd been doing a "spectacular" job....c'mon, spectacular? I couldn't stomach the arrogance).
For the most part I wasn't specific, but I guess I should've been. In fact I had in mind the Mayor of New Orleans, who, to my way of thinking about leadership, committed the absolutely unforgivable sin of failing to take care of his own people. It was criminally negligent to simply issue an evacuation order knowing that something like a fifth of his people simply didn't have the means to comply.
Leaving aside the philosophical question, it was simply stupid in practical terms. We know that prevention is always cheaper than remediation. It would simply have been less costly by many orders of magnitude to have gotten those people out ahead of time. What's the cost of evacuating one person by helicopter from a rooftop? What's the cost of airlifting in food and water? What's the cost of policing the chaos created by all those people stuck there? Medicine and emergency treatment? The list goes on endlessly. There is not one aspect of the situation that couldn't have been handled at less expense, with far less trauma and loss of life, had those people been relocated to dry ground before Katrina hit.
I think what made me so emotional about it last night was too much identification, watching the breakdown of civil order in New Orleans seemingly paralleled by a breakdown of civility here. As Lee put it over on CE, I virtually declared martial law at the HabitableZone. Sweet reason failed, so I had to yell and fire a warning shot into the air.
Not one my better days here, that's for sure.
Glad you're back, Frank. I value your levelheadedness, and missed it the last few days.