The quality of disaster response ought to be a moving target, in that we should expect it to get better with time as we learn from experience.

I think another valid axis of comparison is to look at what we've been promised in the form of homeland security. People in general, and it seems DHS itself, think of it soley in terms of responding to terrorism, but its charter is much broader than that. I keep bringing up the National Response Plan because it represents a concrete set of promises about the national response to various kinds of disasters, both natural and manmade.

This has been the first real test of the Department of Homeland Security, and it's hardly unreasonable to evaluate how well it actually performed compared to its theoretical performance. We're likely to discover flaws in the concept as well as execution.

For example, I found one disturbing paragraph in the NRP that stipulates that whoever first calls for help is the one who's stuck with the bill. If the local or state level asks for Federal help, they'll get a bill for cost-sharing under the Stafford Act; if the Feds respond proactively, they pay for it. Knowing how bureaucracies work, this might set up a deadly game of chicken as everybody holds back waiting for somebody else to act first.

The point being that disaster response is supposed to be an integrated national system, but there may be unintended consequences to the way it was set up. We have to find those and fix them.