one of readers made a smart comment on "katrina" post:
In the US individual States govern over their own people - for the most part. It is not the job of the Federal government to prepare emergency procedures for natural disasters such as hurricanes. That responsibility falls to the state and local governments. However, when a major disaster such as this comes about, the Federal government can take charge once it has been requested by the State.
The State and city governments are at fault for failing to execute proper emergency protocols before and after the storm. As someone pointed out on another site, the US has the best weather forcast system in the world, these people knew the storm was coming for days and they knew it was going to be the big one. They should have prepared accordingly, but they did not.
this partly explains why US reaction to katrina in the first few days was so slow and why there was so much lack of coordinations in the relief efforts afterwards. the system doesn't have the will and efficiency that a relatively centralized government like china has, and when it comes to dealing with disasters of this scale, chinese system works better than the american one.
however, there are much more flaws with china's realtively centralized system, which the chinese government realized and started to change in recent days in its province-city-county reform. to blame somebody or some organizatins for a social ill is easy, but to find the root cause from the system that lead to thiese social ills is not easy.