Slate has some good stuff right now on the incompetence of the feds

Part of the problem is the consolidation of FEMA—an agency that deals with natural disasters—into a superagency set up primarily to deal with terrorist attacks. The head of FEMA used to be a Cabinet-level job and as such would sit in on meetings of the National Security Council and—at least theoretically—have a direct line to the president. When DHS was created in March 2003, all that was taken away; communiqués, bulletins, alerts, and so forth, from FEMA and 21 other federal departments and agencies, would henceforth be filtered through the secretary of homeland security.

If FEMA had still been an independent body in the days and weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck, would the NSC have been more fully warned of the disaster’s potential scope? A FEMA study in early 2001 pegged a hurricane in New Orleans as one of the three biggest catastrophes that might strike the United States (the others were an earthquake in San Francisco and a terrorist attack in New York). Other specialists had warned that the levees might rupture—a possibility that neither the president nor his advisers apparently foresaw.

and the meltdown and outrage among the media on the scene.

A former deputy chief of FEMA told Knight Ridder Newspapers yesterday (Sept. 1) that there “are two kinds of levees—the ones that breached and the ones that will be breached.” A similar aphorism applies to broadcasters: They come in two varieties, the ones that have gone stark, raving mad on air and the ones who will.