Yes, but it was all rather odd from the beginning. Reason? Politics as usual between warring Dems and Repubs.

The declaration of a disaster before the fact was unprecedented, but I think it was one of the good things Bush did. In future, we should be able to do that for evacuation purposes, and to get necessary items like the porta potties, water, and emergency generators in place for shelters of last resort. All the local authorities MUST have satellite phones! They had been gummed up in the Homeland Security bureacracy--state or fed we don't know for sure yet. But they should have been there.

There should be a communications command center that gets flown in for use by the locals FIRST THING! The feds just don't have the local expertise necessary to call the shots, and the locals don't have the communications resources to get the word out.

And by now, there should be multiple databases listing trained first responders from around the country that can be mobilized in advance of these sorts of big disasters we have knowledge of in advance.

According to an article I read at, I think the Disaster News Network, the faith based orgs that do disaster relief all believe there has been an over-reliance on charitable groups by the Bush administration, that has resulted in a cutting out of the state authorities as the middle managers in disaster planning. A very real, and fairly comprehensive breakdown between the feds and the states. That does seem to be playing itself out on the ground in this case.

Which also makes sense. Bush didn't want a lot of the war on terror money being diverted to states, because he wanted federal control of the resources. Yet, he also wanted to get the government out of the humanitarian relief business, and put that burden upon faith based organizations.

What we are seeing, truly, is the first test of Bush's war on terror and disaster management planning and implementation of programs that simply didn't work.