Browsing around, I discovered that the city of New Orleans has a disaster plan - i.e., they had a stated plan of action for this kind of situation. One of the sadder things I'm seeing right now is a desperate attempt by partisans - of all stripes - to grab this disaster and use it as a stick with which to beat their opponents. I'd guess that mistakes were made up and down the chain here:

• Bureaucratic ones further up (Washington), because the larger and organization gets, the more paper is required for anything.
• Local failures to follow the plan - because a plan is one thing, an actual emergency is another.

On that latter point - take a trivial example, backup of crucial data. We all know that hard drives fail, and that we'll face a loss of data at some point. We know this. And yet, how many of us (myself included) fail to do backups diligently, subconsciously thinking "it won't happen to me"? Now, when we do lose data, how many of us decide to point the finger at IT, since it's far easier to do that than look at ourselves?

On the first point, how many of us know a "stickler" who insists on following "the rules", no matter what the situation is? Bureaucracies are loaded with that type of personality.

There's a lot of finger pointing happening here, with the addition of partisan game playing by all and sundry.