New Orleans has been largely evacuated and the long hard job of finding housing, jobs, and schools for the evacuees is ahead of us. Michelle Malkin insists that we don't want the same people handling that work who bungled the immediate storm aftermath. She singles out Michael Brown as one man who shouldn't be in the position he's in and says why.
Brown as head of FEMA certainly has a lot of questions to answer, and we don't want to pass a judgment until more of those answers come in. Likewise, with Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and Governor Blanco of Louisiana. They may turn out to have done as well as could be expected given the circumstances, but their performance raises questions and needs to be scrutinized.
Much more important than fixing blame, however, is that we learn the lessons of this calamity. Without wishing to sound perverse, Katrina may have done us a favor if it forced us to address weaknesses in our emergency preparedness. We know that Muslim terrorists are trying to find a way to detonate a nuclear weapon in a major city. Should they succeed, God forbid, the lessons we learn from this hurricane will be essential to responding to that disaster.
Let's hope that state and city governments across this nation have called for meetings all next week to begin the process of reviewing, assessing, and improving their plans for dealing with devastating catastrophes in their jurisdictions.