Free Republic

Among the many achievements of the human race - Chartres Cathedral, the Mona Lisa - surely the New Orleans emergency preparedness plan must rank among the greatest, and the fact that this plan turned out to be irrelevant to reality should not detract from its stature as a masterpiece of bureaucratic thinking. The plan (which is viewable online at www.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=46&tabid=26) begins with the insight: Be prepared. Or as the plan puts it, "Individuals with assigned tasks must receive preparatory training to maximize operations." The plan lays out a course of action so that all personnel will know exactly what to...

Why is New Orleans in so much worse shape today than New York City was after the attacks on Sept. 11? The short answer is that New York was attacked by fire, not water. But then why are urbanites so much better prepared to cope with fire than with flooding? Mostly because they learned to fight fire without any help from the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For most of history, fire was far more feared than flooding. Cities repeatedly burned to the ground. Those catastrophes occurred sporadically enough that politicians must have been tempted...

It is daunting what the 600 patients and staff members trapped by a moat of filthy water inside Charity Hospital in New Orleans have been doing without. The lights are down, which means that medication must be rushed through sodden hallways by flashlight after dark. The ventilators are down, which meant that, for a while, nurses had to pump the airbags of pulmonary cases by hand.There are few phones. No x-ray machines. No CAT scans. No computers. No air-conditioners. The lab is down, which means that if a patient has an infection, physicians must determine how serious it is by...