Katrina again

The New York Times reports that Hurricane Katrina exposed a flaw in the government's plans for dealing with a national disaster, which may explain the Pentagon's delay in sending troops to New Orleans:

The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated...

The federal government rewrote its national emergency response plan after the Sept. 11 attacks, but it relied on local officials to manage any crisis in its opening days. But Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed local "first responders," including civilian police and the National Guard.

At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Chertoff said, "The unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model, one for what you might call kind of an ultra-catastrophe.""

It just now occurs to them that in the event that a city is destroyed in a hurricane (or nuclear attack for that matter) local police and firefighters may not be available to help in rescue efforts? They're going to have to go back to the drawing board to figure this out? What the.......