Chicago Tribune: Disaster plan not executed

WASHINGTON -- Government disaster officials had an action plan if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when Hurricane Katrina struck.

Thirteen months before Katrina hit New Orleans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill that Ronald Castleman, then the regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called 'a very good exercise.'

More than a million residents were 'evacuated' in the table-top scenario as 120-mile-an-hour winds and 20 inches of rain caused widespread flooding that supposedly trapped 300,000 people in the city.

The difference between evacuating someone in a simulated exercise and in real life is miles apart.

There will be a bit of the blame game going on and people trying to avoid being held responsible for mistakes they've made.

One of the many things that tires me about politics is this: In any endeavor I undertake, I look back at it afterwards and think about ways that it could have been better. That's the military training coming through, we always conducted "after action reviews" where we were free to critique our performance and the performance of others. Done right, this is an excellent tool.

Unfortunately, in politics, this technique is impossible to implement. Because some people are interested in assigning blame, for political purposes, people try to avoid taking responsibility, for political purposes.

This leaves people like me, with one foot in politics and one foot in the real world of people who do things for a living, in a difficult position. I can critique the Administration's response and aid those who would use that honest critique for a dishonest political advantage.

Well, anyway, there is one question that could clear things up a great deal. That's the timeline of decision-making. The levees broke on Tuesday, that's when this became the Biblical proportion crisis. When was the first "button" pushed? What was the expected amount of time for the feds to respond to button 1 being pushed? Did the feds meet that milestone, or not? If not, why not? Was the reason the milestone not met acceptable? Etc.

Unfortunately, since this is intertwined with politics (and large corprations have this problem too), we probably won't get a spin-free after action review.

This leaves people like me, with one foot in politics and one foot in the real world of people who do things for a living, in a difficult position. I can critique the Administration's response and aid those who would use that honest critique for a dishonest political advantage.

Wow, that concisely explains my paralysis in words that I just haven't been able to find.