Say Anything Blog

FEMA’s response to the Mississippi Valley flooding has apparently been “exemplary.”

Much of the Mississippi River Valley is now underwater, and the Associated Press reports from East St. Louis, Ill., that FEMA’s performance has been exemplary . . . . Now, we’d like to see some investigative reporting into the differences between the Gulf Coast in 2005 and the Upper Midwest in ‘08. We’re not prepared to accept on FEMA’s say-so that its leaders learned the lessons of Katrina and everything works now. It’s possible that Katrina was simply a harder-to-manage challenge because it was such a massive storm and because it hit an area (especially New Orleans and Louisiana) with weak social structures and poor government.

Either way, though, the claims that Bush deliberately neglected disaster preparedness have been disproved. If the Katrina-era problems have been remedied, then the Bush administration’s shortcomings were real but inadvertent. If not, then FEMA always was up to the task of an ordinary-scale disaster, and those who expected better of it in Katrina were unrealistic.

Personally I thought both FEMA’s failings during Katrina and the disaster itself (remember the bedlam which was supposed to have been taking place in the Superdome?) was exaggerated by the media.  Katrina was an unprecedented disaster, and instead of helping to mitigate that disaster local citizens and government officials spent most of their time waiting for the feds to make everything better, and then complaining about the feds when they couldn’t just sweep away the consequences of a massive hurricane breaching levies that weren’t designed to stand up to such a storm.

Subsequent attempts to politicize the disaster and turn those hit by it into a specialized victim class have only exacerbated those initial exaggerations.