Until this last week I had assumed there were regularly updated plans in existence for all these disasters, so that whatever happened the available resources would be deployed without any delay.

That's pretty clearly not something it is safe to assume is the case in the USA. I hope we're a bit better organised here (and I think we are actually, because I used to be involved in keeping our local information base up to date).

I hope that Americans are now going to be hammwering on their City Halls and so forth, demanding to know what kind of advance planning exists, and what it looks like.