There will be a lot of noise...but I think in the end we will find that just about everybody responded as they should have after the storm. I don't feel the same way about the preparation before the storm.
But when all the facts are in, and all the hype and political BS is separated out, I think we'll find that people of all political parties and persuasions, governmental levels, and ranks did the best anybody could have done.
That will make some folks unhappy, but they will just have to get over it.
I was deeply involved in the recovery from Hurricane Andrew, and I can tell you from personal experience that things are not as simple as they seem. The decisions are not as easy as "do we pick this person or that person off the roof?" The objectives is not having a perfect, squeaky-clean rescue and evacuation of one family. The objective is to get the job done and tidy up the details later.
The objective is also not to save everybody -- unless you are a total fool. Saving everybody in a disaster of this magnitude is simply not one of the options -- it ain't gonna happen. One of the hardest things for disaster responders to deal with is that some people are going to die, and there is nothing you can do about it.
The objective is to save as many people as possible, and that means huge resources accumulated in an organized manner, delivered in a systematic and efficient fashion.
People with no understanding of the process -- or with political or commercial agendas -- will complain because resources took a long time to come; they always do. People will be inconvenienced, people will be miserable, people will suffer, people will die because of the lag time in getting help.
But, in the end, that planning and organization time will save more lives than rushing in and creating a huge traffic jam of useless people and supplies that nobody needs, can use, or get to.
You don't wave a magic wand to get a 100-truck convoy of relief supplies to a destination where people can safely and efficiently get access. You give some thought to where the relief center should be. You organize drivers, trucks, and supplies and bring them together. You fly over the route in a helicopter, identifying each intersection where police officers need to be stationed to keep traffic from interfering with the convoy. You schedule the transport around weather, rush hour, whatever impediments you may encounter.
Then -- and only then -- you blow the convoy through and deliver tons of supplies. A few hours later, you blow another convoy through, and another, and another. (Don't forget, the objective is not just to keep these victims alive for an hour, but for weeks, months, years.) That's the way it works, just like a military operation -- slow to get started, but effective in the end.
[EDIT: A good example of that -- and yes, my flame suit is ON -- is the evacuation from the Superdome and Convention Center. Did it take a long time? Yep. Did people die as a result? Probably. Was it pretty? Nope.
But you can't ignore the fact that they evacuated 33,000 people in a little over two days. Not only that, but they moved them 350 miles! That doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen without hundreds of people doing wonderful work.]
It's never perfect; there's always a nit to pick. The only thing that is perfect is hindsight, and most of that (mine included) is heavily skewed by expectations and biases.
So I think there will be a lot of individual heroes, mostly friends, neighbors, and worker-bees who do extraordinary, and sometimes foolish, things. But there will also be a huge number of people - including many that all of us love to take potshots at - who ignored the flak and did their jobs.
