As the scenes of destruction from Hurricane Katrina were broadcast around the world last week, one thing became painfully clear: The federal government was not prepared for this.

In New Orleans, those stranded by the storm grew angrier by the hour, as the skies above them did not have the pounding thump of helicopters bringing food, water and medical supplies to the scene of the disaster. Looters tore open store fronts in an effort to find the basic necessities of life, or maybe something a little extra. It/s difficult to imagine what use a pair of new Levis would be in the midst of such destruction. But then, it/s difficult for most of us to imagine what it would be like to be stranded in a stifling hot city without electric power, food, water or the medicines necessary to keep a person alive.

Questions began surfacing last Thursday evening about the federal government/s reaction 7 or rather its lack of reaction 7 to the situation. Even as TV news shows were displaying video of bodies of refugees who died while awaiting help of some kind, federal officials were explaining why they hadn/t sent convoys of buses to New Orleans, or airlifted life-saving supplies into New Orleans.

The official explanation was that they couldn/t get to the scene. Flooded neighborhoods kept relief supplies at bay. Rescue workers feared for their lives because angry refugees were shooting at the helicopters. They said, time and again, that the government simply had not anticipated this level of chaos and tragedy.

But, of course, they had reason to anticipate this. New Orleans has been on the disaster red list for generations, because of its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, and because the city itself was precariously protected by a network of levees, much of which is 100 years old.

As recently as 2002, the Federal Emergency Management Agency 7 or FEMA, the group whose responsibility it is to deal with such disasters 7 had completed a simulation that almost exactly duplicated what happened in New Orleans last week. After the computer test, the city was ranked in the top five metropolitan areas nationwide that would be devastated by a severe hurricane.

So, how could federal officials not be prepared for Hurricane Katrina and its dreadful aftermath? All the government/s models and a century of empirical evidence pointed directly to the kind of situation that occurred last week in the Gulf states generally, and in New Orleans specifically.

Yet, as of Friday, four full days after the storm smashed through the region, only a trickle of food, water and medical supplies was forthcoming from federal agencies. The federal government did virtually nothing to rescue the stranded refugees. It got so bad at one point that a 20-year-old New Orleans man stole a school bus, and drove the busload of storm victims to Houston.

Shouldn/t the federal government have been helping evacuate the refugees? Isn/t that why Americans fork over a significant percentage of their paychecks each week to the IRS, so the government will have the money to supply the resources needed when a catastrophic natural disaster occurs?

There was also talk that the reason the federal response was so slow could be seen in video from the stricken areas, which showed mostly black and poor people 7 New Orleans residents who didn/t have the personal resources to get out of the path of the storm. Black people and the poor seem to have taken the worst of Katrina/s wrath. One wonders if FEMA would have been this slow to respond to a large-scale disaster in Manhattan or Malibu.

Can that be true? Can a nation that has grown as much as we have in the past 200 years really be that cold and racist? We hope not, but you/ll have a hard time convincing the refugees in New Orleans that they didn/t get immediate help because they are at the lower end of the economic spectrum in the United States.

The federal government didn/t have this much trouble responding to the terrorist threat when it sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, meandering wars that will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of U.S. soldiers/ lives. It seems that if our government can mobilize and fight to bring democracy to an Islamic nation, it should be able to do a better job of keeping Americans from starving to death in downtown New Orleans after a bad storm.

Sept. 4, 2005