To: TimF who wrote (259556 ) 11/11/2005 5:17:58 PM From: tejek Respond to The feds did perform poorly, perhaps very poorly, in response to Katrina. No need to excuse that. Its just a fact that should be faced. The local and state first responders performed even worse, but that provides no major excuse for the Feds. The feds probably performed as well (after adjusting for the scale of the situation and the difficulties involved) as they had in past disasters, and probably did better then relief efforts by many other governments, even governments of wealthy nations. But still they didn't do good enough. Pointing out that some people have gone overboard in their critism is not to say that a good deal of criticism is diserved. Overall performance was not as bad as it has often been portrayed. The situation was huge and very difficult to deal with. Perhaps the worst thing done by FEMA was trying to control everything and blocking efforts and private rescue and relief. Esp. early on you often get more relief help from the efforts of private individuals near the disaster area then you get from government bureaucracies. FEMA did just about everything it could to shut down or rigidly control all the relief efforts and by doing so caused effective disaster relief to take longer for many people.
