Grading the Gap

Caught up as I was in the late night response effort on other blogs commenting on the governance failures surrounding Katrina, at one time recently I graded the response efforts as follows:

NOLA city goverance - D minus
LA state goverance - D
US Admin governance - C minus

which was based on this initial rationale:

US law places upon local and state administrations, and not the feds, the responsibility for performing every manner of disaster planning and response. The fed support was in place and available. But the local effort was ill-planned.

What gives me the right to grade these efforts, you ask? I'm a US citizen and I have EVERY right to grade them, that's why - I respond.

But further than that, in previous lives I've had many years of fleet and system planning experience, spent several years on the board of an outstanding ambulance (and first responder) service, spent years as a CA trained county peace officer and supervisor, and volunteer each year to oversee the public and volunteer transportation segments of at least two internationally known public events - duties which require months of preparation each year, even though they are basically repeats of a previous year's successful efforts.

In the next few days I plan on revisiting and revising this subject based on information obtained in the interim.

Cheers