"Facing the unforeseeable"

There is no plan.
A National Guard MP in the Superdome described it: "This is mass chaos. To tell you the truth, I'd rather be in Iraq. You got your constant danger, but I had something to protect myself. [And] three meals a day. Communications. A plan. Here, they had no plan."
No, likely not.
Not for something like this.
And I can't fault them, not really.
Its just too horrible, too massive. The mind just refuses to grasp it.
Imagine if, say, a year ago. someone says to the city council of New Orleans "hey, guys, what if there is a hurricane and the levees fail and there are people drowned all over and there are no phones and the power goes out and the highways are broken and the streets are flooded and we have thousands of refugees in the Superdome and . . . "
Nope, not gonna imagine it, too horrible, makes me feel sick, sorreee -- let's just stick our thumbs in our ears and waggle our fingers and say NA-NA-NA-NA-NA until that annoying voice just goes away.
It reminds me about the Quebec ice storm of 1998.
They didn't have a plan either -- except for one little town south of Montreal who apparently had one of those nitpicking finnikin city managers who had a plan for EVERYTHING, so he had a bunch of volunteers out knocking ice off the town's transmission towers even before it stopped raining. They survived the ice storm quite nicely, thank you, and I hope that guy got a big raise.
Anyway, the report done about the ice storm concluded that there needed to be a "culture of emergency preparedness" established in Quebec, so that people would learn how to "face the unforeseeable" and figure out, in advance, what their most important problems would be if disaster struck.
It's just not something that people do very easily.
Seems to me that New Orlean's number one engineering priority now is closing those dykes.
And their number one human priority is doing something about communications -- even sending out city workers with bullhorns on boats to make announcements would be an improvement on what they are doing now, which is nothing.
And when I was looking for the ice storm descriptions, I came across this site with all sorts of survival kits -- for a hundred bucks you can buy a wind-up radio and flashlight kit, for example. Worth thinking about -- and a heck of a lot better than just sticking our thumbs in our ears and chanting NA-NA-NA-NA.