Good executive summary, Don. Now I wonder if I could encourage you to get more technical?

I have the benefit of having read Tom's response before I wrote this, so I can say that the most important thing we need is a timeline of how things should have happened: specifically when disaster declarations should have been issued; what warnings NIMO was obligated to issue when, in its role as national command center; the threshold or trigger that, according to the NRP, would have obligated NIMO to take a proactive role, and when it was present; clarification of lines of authority, not just up and down the governmental hierarchy, but laterally--relationship between DHS and DOD, for example; and on and on.

I think that the DHS National Response Plan is a key document for this purpose. Tom and I have skimmed it, and both of us found things that seemed relevant, though of course through very different interpetive eyes. I noted that, despite the claims of Bush apologists that the Federal government's hands were tied because the law required them to wait for requests for help from the state and local level, in fact the NRP contains explicit exemptions empowering the Feds to act preemptively when the local levels are overwhelmed or about to be overwhelmed. What were the signals that should have triggered those exemptions, and were they missed by the DHS?

You touched on that when you mentioned the difference in onset between a hurricane and an earthquake. In your part of the country, would a massive blizzard be a useful analogy? Massive inundation of the flood plain, through catastrophic snow melt or a dam burst? (Just groping in the dark, of course; I've only been there once, many years ago, and vaguely remember a town on a plain surrounded by distant mountains.)

Keep going, Don.