The media is no help at all, when the AP stories contain graphs like this:

Even as Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf Coast that Sunday night and early Monday, Aug. 28-29, and the National Hurricane Center was warning of growing danger, the White House didn’t alter the president’s plans to fly from his Texas ranch to the West to promote a new Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Bush failed to use his superpowers to divert the storm! Perhaps he should have stood at the shoreline, like Canute, to remind the media fools that the president cannot, in fact, stem the tide.

This isn’t what the president does, nor is it what I want him to do. Let’s lay this one out right now: if a natural or man-made disaster ever befalls my community, I don’t want the president — any president — to come anywhere near me till a year after it’s over. Can we get bracelets and dog tags engraved to that effect?

I don’t want to be window dressing for his photo ops, I don’t want his entourages and secret service sucking up crucial resources and time. I want him to stay back and make sure the rescue/relief system is running smoothly.

It’s the “running smoothly” part that’s not been happening. But please, keep the chief executives away from the disasters. At that moment, you want a mid-level leader to step in and just grip the thing by the balls and take charge. A Giuliani. So far, in Louisiana, the closest thing we’ve got is Lt. Gen. Honore. He’s damned good: no nonsense, but full of compassionate energy. He reminds me in some ways of old Smedley Butler.

***

A block-length chunk of wall crumbled along a canal, and New Orleans drowned. That wall could have been shored up, for a few hundred thousand dollars, at any time over the past 30 years.

Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush. All could have put money for a stronger canal wall into their budgets. Any Congress from then till now could have done the same. But none of them did. Yet all the while the federal government spent millions to build everything else under the sun: Pet highways for powerful congressmen; bridges to uninhabited islands in Alaska; museums nobody visits.

Penny-wise. And typically American. We were too cheap to send national taxpayer money to New Orleans before the flood to build up the walls, so now we risk the whole economy by losing our major southern port and river terminus. We were too free to allow our governments routinely to force evacuations, so now we spend a fortune evacuating tens of thousands of people one by one from rooftops by high-tech helicopters.

It would be nice if the government spent our tax money based on priorities that include the depth of the catastrophe that could result if the money isn’t spent there. To some degree you can predict that. But what would be helpful right now to save lives from a cat 5 storm next year that hits Miami? Or Savannah? Or Tampa? Or Key West? Or Mobile? Or Pensacola? Or Houston? Are you folks in Minnesota willing to pony up for that now, rather than that bypass or that national forest you really think you need?

Especially if there’s no guarantee it’s going to work? Because New Orleans is one big sandcastle, and the section of canal wall that gave way was not the one anyone close to the scene would have bet on to go first.

No one expected that weak spot to be on a canal that, if anything, had received more attention and shoring up than many other spots in the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls.

Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said that was particularly surprising because the break was “along a section that was just upgraded.”

“It did not have an earthen levee,” Dr. Penland said. “It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick.”

As it is, we live in a half-ruined federalist system of broken balances, with an almighty federal authority but a ghost of state rights that flows the money back to the local communities through channels based on Congressional clout. In every election, around here, the same question arises: “are we getting our fair share?” How much tax money is paid in by our state, how much federal money flows back. The incumbent — never mind the party — says yes. The challenger says no.

***

In the front of all the phone books here where I live are 14 pages of “important emergency information,” describing evacuation procedures for people who live near Three Mile Island. Since the near-disaster there in 1979, a thoroughly plotted system of warnings and evacuations has been in place for everyone who lives in a ten-mile radius around the nuclear power plant, a region of farms and small towns.

Huge sirens are mounted on high metal pylons. Every few months, the disaster drill gets a run-through. All the fire and rescue and police departments do their appointed tasks, the bus drivers gather at the appropriate places, and after it’s over the officials compare notes on how well it all went.

The first goal is to gather people into big buildings: high schools, malls, sports complexes. Each neighborhood is routed to a different place. The assumption is, once people get there, the government will meet them and help them.

This is something like what happened in New Orleans. But with one exception: Instead of moving people away from the problem, then getting them into clusters — like an elementary school fire drill — the New Orleans officials moved people together at a spot in what turned out to be the center of the disaster zone. Concentrating people concentrates their problems, and with infrastructure destroyed, there was no way to get them out fast enough, and the Superdome melted down.

Yet I wonder, what if there had been an evacuation plan for New Orleans like there is for my county? TMI always is in the same place. But hurricanes move, and only the wind gods know where they’ll go. Wouldn’t it be possible that people northeast of the Mississippi River would have been sent to Biloxi? It’s the nearest big place to the east. The day before the hurricane hit, they might have been told to go there, to the cavernous casinos, perhaps. Yet at the last minute, literally, the killer storm juked to the east, and Biloxi bore the brunt of its fury, while the northeastern suburbs of New Orleans have remained relatively dry and safe. What if tens of thousands of those folks had been on the road to Biloxi, or huddled inside it, when Katrina blew it to matchsticks?

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