The fact that evacuation plans for NoLa didn’t take into consideration the fact that 25% of the population was below the poverty line and would have to rely on someone else providing the means to escape is at least partly the city’s fault.

The incredible lack of coordination since then between city, state and federal levels is clearly everyone’s responsibility, although the coordination role is explicitly FEMA’s, and therefore Homeland Security’s.

The personal behaviour of President Bush, and his cabinet, is particularly distressing, tho, uncaring, disconnected and arrogant,

In the UK, we would already have at least one or two resignations amongst them, simply for taking so long to react personally!

There is plenty of blame to go around. Sure, I fully agree that a lot of the blame falls on the feds for poor action post-strike. But some also belongs to the lionized locals who could have made the situation afterwards quite a bit easier to manage. Each city in this country – through the legal authority of the state, not the feds – gets to write and execute its own evac plan. That there were still hundreds of thousands in the city when the storm struck was not the fault of FEMA. Now the feds have to clean up two messes instead of one.