It’s clear we don’t yet know the scale of the disaster to hit the Gulf Coast, because it’s still getting worse.  There are images of countless lost souls wandering the streets, of anger, confusion, bodies, terrible grief and - now - random explosions and raging fires. Watching the coverage, it looks like there are more journalists roaming the streets than aid workers.

An area bigger than the UK has been hit. We hear reports of people dying in the aid centres, and their bodies lying uncollected. Law and order has broken down, probably because there’s no food and water. The hospitals can’t take any more patients, and there aren’t enough buses to evacuate just those at the Superdome in New Orleans. That city’s not going to be habitable for weeks, maybe months, and in the meantime there are more than a million people scattered through the US who are essentially refugees, homeless and jobless.

If you ever thought those 80s films, warning of the horrors of life after nuclear war, were over-stated, here’s proof they were spot on.

A few commentators sound a lot like they’re blaming President Bush for the weather, which is pretty absurd. Jeff Jarvis gets it right when, when branding this "more than a tragedy - a scandal" he says the problem lies "from Bush down to cabinet officials down to legislators down to state
officials down to the soon-to-be-former-mayor down to those police".

I can even understand why Bush just flew over the disaster area in his 747, rather than attempting to visit the area earlier in the week - his arrival would surely have been a distraction too far. That said, the juxtaposition, in the same news bulletins, of President in Air Force One vs citizens waist-deep in sea and shit was perhaps an image many politicians would have sought to avoid.

But questions are more justified around what his administration did to prepare for an event that, in 2001, was rated the third most likely disaster likely to befall the US, after a terrorist attack on New York. Make no mistake: they knew this was coming, as Sidney Blumenthal writes in today’s Guardian.

"A year ago the US army corps of engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, the Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Operated by the corps of engineers, levees and pumping stations were strengthened and renovated. In 2001, when George Bush became president, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely potential disasters - after a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers’ request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration’s additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate debated adding funds for fixing levees, but it was too late."

Meanwhile, President Bush calls for a zero tolerance attitude towards looters. But, given only the poorest and most infirm were left in the path of the hurricane, and given the level of response thus far to the disaster, can we be surprised people are smashing some windows for food and clean water too? In their position, I’d be in there too.

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