"We lost thousands of lives that could have been saved"

The New York Times analysis of the response to the Katrina hurricane gets it right, I think:

Disarray Marked the Path From Hurricane to Anarchy

...[A]n initial examination of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force....

Oliver Thomas, the New Orleans City Council president, expressed a view shared by many in city and state government: that a national disaster requires a national response. "Everybody's trying to look at it like the City of New Orleans messed up," Mr. Thomas said in an interview. "But you mean to tell me that in the richest nation in the world, people really expected a little town with less than 500,000 people to handle a disaster like this? That's ludicrous to even think that."....

[T]he chief federal failure was not anticipating that the city and state would be so compromised.....

70 percent of the New Orleans area's 53 nursing homes were not evacuated before the hurricane struck Monday morning....

Before the last people were evacuated [from the Convention Center] that Saturday, several bodies were dumped near a door, and two or three babies died of dehydration....24 people died either inside or just outside the convention center.....

FEMA's deference was frustrating. Rather than initiate relief efforts - buses, food, troops, diesel fuel, rescue boats - the agency waited for specific requests from state and local officials. "When you go to war you don't have time to ask for each round of ammunition that you need," complained Colonel Ebbert, the city's emergency operations director.....

"We lost thousands of lives that could have been saved," [Wayne County, Michigan] Sheriff [Warren C.] Evans, said.