David Brooks in NYT on Katrina's predecessors back to the Johnstown Flood

The Storm After the Storm - New York Times:

"Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the 'human storm' - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed."

Brooks provides relevant insights into social dislocations which followed earlier disasters like the Johnstown (PA) Flood of 1889 and the great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 which devastated New Orleans. Seeing so many people in New Orleans, almost all of them Black, left wholly adrift by their city and state governments has saddened me greatly in purely human terms. Brooks reminds us of the political backlash that is likely to follow. It will only get uglier, I fear.

Reading the peerless Vox Day's blog this night was the first I had heard of Governor Blanco's meltdown. I had heard lots of criticism of Governor Barbour, who is at least on the job, and the absurd suggestion that President Bush caused the hurricane by not adopting the Kyoto accords, but had seen no comment on Governor Blanco's manifest incompetence.

Of course, we can fix blame at leisure. But if any public official is footdragging someone is going to have to fire them, suspend them, or - in the case of the state's governor - just take the initiative to work around them. To the Adjutant General, the EMA director, and the AG of Louisiana: find some way to work around this woman, you owe your first duty to the people of your state.