Unsurprising
Just as with 9/11, now that a particular contingency has materialized it's easy to see all the ways it could have been prevented or its damage minimized. And just as with 9/11, it's obvious that no one would ever have accepted the resource allocations that would have been necessary--in the abstract, on speculation--to prevent something that, once prevented, starts to seem like it wasn't ever really a possibility in the first place. Can you imagine how a post-9/11 passenger screening regime would have been greeted before 9/11? It would have been a total non-starter. A similar calculus surely applies to Katrina. (Yes, I know, a storm like that was inevitable and 9/11 was not. I live in Seattle. A 9.0 earthquake is probably inevitable, but there's simply no way people here, or the nation, would commit anywhere near enough present scarce resources to ensure that our post-disaster needs are met more effectively than those of New Orleans were this week.)
In order to have had a much faster and more comprehensive response in the event, I suspect that several times the resources would have had to be allocated before the fact. If resource level x gets everyone taken care of in six days and resource level y gets everyone taken care of in three days, you can bet that y is a lot more than 2x. Are we really surprised that resource level y was not committed on spec, as part of the planning process? And the 80/20 rule suggests that if you have, say, 500,000 people in your city, 100,000 (20%) of those will consume 80% of the resources it takes to attend to all of them (New Orleans round numbers are practically a story problem for the 80/20 rule). It's not a small thing to get that last 20% of people out. Achieving the conventional wisdom's "proper" level of response to this crisis would have required many times the resources, dedicated in advance of an instant threat.
I'm not surprised in the least by the way things have unfolded.
posted at 10:30 PM
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