Following on this earlier post and Joe Carter’s post noted in the post below regarding the failures of the federal government in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, former state legislator Bob Williams — whose district was the most impacted by the Mount St. Helens eruption — lays the wood to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in this equally devastating Opinion Journal op-ed

The primary responsibility for dealing with emergencies does not belong to the federal government. It belongs to local and state officials who are charged by law with the management of the crucial first response to disasters. First response should be carried out by local and state emergency personnel under the supervision of the state governor and his/her emergency operations center.
The actions and inactions of Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin are a national disgrace due to their failure to implement the previously established evacuation plans of the state and city. Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin cannot claim that they were surprised by the extent of the damage and the need to evacuate so many people. Detailed written plans were already in place to evacuate more than a million people. The plans projected that 300,000 people would need transportation in the event of a hurricane like Katrina. If the plans had been implemented, thousands of lives would likely have been saved.

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Although one whould caution against jumping to conclusions before facts are established, tongues will nevertheless be wagging across the United States today in the face of this devastating Wall Street Journal ($) article that lists the incidents reflecting lack of organization and preparedness in the federal government’s response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, including the following:

The U.S. Army has a large facility, Fort Polk, in Leesville, La., about 270 miles northwest of New Orleans. Officials at Fort Polk, which has nearly 8,000 active-duty soldiers, said their contribution so far has consisted of a few dozen soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division manning purification equipment and driving half-ton trucks filled with supplies and equipment. The first contingent of soldiers didn’t receive orders until Saturday afternoon.

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The Librarians’ Index to the Internet has put together a terrific web resource center for Hurricane Katrina-related information, including information on volunteer opportunities, legal matters, displaced students, charitable giving, animal rescue, missing persons, temporary housing, flood control, levee management, gas prices, environmental factors, news sites, maps and images, and much more. Moreover, LII.org continually updates their webpages, so check back from time-to-time to review the resources added to the Hurricane Katrina webpage.
Man, those librarians sure can organize, eh? ;^)

It’s not everyone who can make this type of contribution to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort:

Greg Norman is lending his personal helicopter to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, just as he did after last year’s destructive hurricane season.
Norman sent the helicopter to the greater Louisiana area Friday, and said it will remain in service for as long as a month. His pilot, Gary Hogan, will fly medical supplies and other items into the region.
“Our thoughts and feelings go out to everyone over there,” Norman said.
Norman’s estate on Jupiter Island, about 90 miles north of Miami, was damaged by hurricanes Frances and Jeanne last year. He lent his helicopter – which can carry about 1,000 pounds of supplies and shuttle small groups of patients and medics – to the recovery effort.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency contacted the helicopter’s manufacturer in recent days seeking help, and word eventually got to Norman. FEMA will coordinate Hogan’s flights and supply fuel.
“They need as much airlift as they can get,” Norman said.

As noted here earlier, I don’t think it’s the time to point fingers at each other while there are still people to be saved inside New Orleans, although I do think the question of why troops were not used earlier to re-establish civil order is a reasonable one.
However, among the early analysis of what went wrong with the various governmental responses to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this Washington Post article makes it clear that the Bush Administration is not going to take all the blame for various shortcomings:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state’s emergency operations center said Saturday.
The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.
A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.

As one my former professors used to remind me, “they fiddle while Rome burns and, to make matters worse, they do not realize that Rome is burning or that they are fiddling.”
Meanwhile, this City Journal article is a pretty darn astute analysis of what happened last weekend in New Orleans. Hat tip to Tom Smith over at the Right Coast for the City Journal piece.

As Americans are still attempting to absorb the shock of the largest exodus of citizens during our nation’s modern history, the Chronicle’s Steve Campbell’s great photo of the inside of Houston’s Astrodome provides the backdrop to a huge part of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort that you do not see on television — the massive effort by a network of Houston-area churches and charities to provide relief resources to the tens of thousands of Gulf Coast evacuees who are residing in hotels and homes throughout Houston and Texas.

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Six days after Hurricane Katrina hammered a main conduit of the U.S. energy and shipping industries, much of the crucial infrastructure on the energy industry in the Gulf Coast region those remains shut down. Although a full assessment of the status of the region’s infrastructure still cannot be made because of the post-storm chaos, it is becoming increasingly clear that refining and production capacity in the region will be curtailed for a prolonged period of time. Earlier posts on the developing economic effects of Katrina over the past week are here, here, here, here, here and here.
First, the impact on refining capacity. The storm shut down about two million barrels a day of crude-oil refining capacity. That translates to the loss of about one million barrels a day of gasoline production, which is about 10% of total U.S. demand. It is now apparent that at least four refineries that together generate about 5% of U.S. oil-refining capacity will be down for at least a month as those facilities are repaired. Meanwhile, damage to production capacity has also been extensive. Although production is coming back on-line slowly, it’s becoming clearer that it will take at least several weeks — and perhaps months — for production levels to return to near pre-Katrina levels.

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In the chaos of the worst natural disaster of our time, the remarkable Houston community provided extraordinary relief for tens of thousands of New Orleans area evacuees and, in so doing, provided a substantial part of the calming effect that steadied jittery economic markets still attempting to stabilize from the effects of Hurricane Katrina.
First, the economic update. As the evacuation of New Orleans picked up steam on Friday, crude-oil and gasoline futures fell sharply as the federal government and the International Energy Agency arranged to release almost 2 million of barrels of oil daily to cover shortages caused by Hurricane Katrina. The short-term supply relief drove benchmark light, sweet crude oil October futures contracts down nearly $2 to $67.57 a barrel on the Nymex Exchange. Earlier posts on the developing economic effects of Katrina over the past week are here, here, here, here and here.
In addition to the drop in crude futures, Nymex gasoline futures for October fell 22.53 cents to finish at $2.1837 a gallon and the October contracts fell another 23 cents in overnight trading to end at $2.2295 a gallon. Also, Nymex heating oil futures for October traded down 10.74 cents to $2.0911 a gallon.

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Late night television viewers are still shaking their heads over ABC Nightline’s Ted Koppel‘s interview last night of Mike Brown, embattled director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Here is a partial transcript of the interview, a portion of which went like this:

Koppel: You have chaos and anarchy breaking out in a number of different places in New Orleans, it would seem the first thing is to get good solid combat troops like the 82nd airborne or 101st in there. These are guys who are ready to move immediately. Instead you send National Guardsmen and it’s taking time. You don’t have time.
Brown: [T]here will soon be 30,000 armed National Guard troops in there to restore order, to take control of the facilities and allow us to do our job.
Koppel: Mr. Brown, you know, forgive me . . . But here we are, essentially five days after the storm hit, and you are talking about what’s going to happen in the next couple of days.

It didn’t get any better for Mr. Brown. Read the entire piece here.
Update: Stephen Bainbridge is asking the same question as Mr. Koppel.