The destruction and death visited upon New Orleans could have been prevented in part if the federal government had years ago responded to the need to repair and replace old levees and other flood-control measures. That fact is bad enough in a city as exposed to natural calamity as New Orleans. But the circumstances pale by comparison with the cavalier, inept and unprofessional response by the Bush administration to the tragedy as it unfolded to destroy a great American city.

If the federal government is this incompetent in dealing with a natural disaster, how can Americans possibly believe that the Department of Homeland Security would do any better in the event of a terrorist attack?

From Arab News (8/31)

In the same way that Americans started to think differently about defense and terrorism after 9/11, there is every possibility that Hurricane Katrina’s destructive rampage will alter views about climate change. Until now there has been no stimulus to rethink ideas. There were no home-based massive natural disasters to bring the American media, the American public and American politicians face to face with the erratic weather patterns that are the consequences of global warming and which have had such disastrous impact elsewhere on the planet.
....

.... If public opinion decides that Katrina was a hurricane too many, if that change of mind batters some fresh thinking into the US administration, then much good will have come out of this tragedy.

From David Aaronovitch in the Times of London—

The truth is that the New Orleans disaster is far worse than 9/11, and dwarfs anything seen in the West in modern times save for the Etna eruption and the San Francisco earthquake. In that sense it only tells us how vulnerable we are.

Well, not all of us equally. When disasters or fires or bombings happen, you discover just who was travelling on your trains, who was crammed into your hostels or who was living in the low-lying areas. It isn’t the failure to act in New Orleans that is the story here, it’s the sheer, uninsured, uncared for, self-disenfranchised scale of the poverty that lies revealed. It looks like a scene from the Third World because that’s the truth. It’s a quiet disaster that’s been going on for years — a pudding-basin-full-of-poverty situation.

Andrew Buncombe and Andrew Gumbel in the Independent—

The prospect of an ugly, elemental battle for survival in New Orleans was made worse by the fact that even before Hurricane Katrina it was the poorest urban area in the United States. The ghastly spectacle of overwhelmingly black residents caged in an unsanitary sports stadium and left almost entirely to their own devices could not but evoke memories of the darkest days of segregation and overtly racist Jim Crow laws in the American South. The potential for racial conflict has been quietly side-stepped in much of the US media coverage to date, but it is also impossible to ignore.
....

The prospect of a major societal breakdown was not restricted to the disaster area. As the first evacuees were welcomed to their new temporary home, the Astrodome in Houston, officials felt obliged to deny that the dispossessed were being held in prison-like conditions. The Astrodome was "not a jail", the chief executive of Harris County, which encompasses Houston, insisted at a news conference.