One of the reasons that goverments and the current administration needs to pay attention to issues like this in advance is the mid- and long-range secondary and tertiary consequences of a natural disaster. What happened in New Orleans was not a surprise.

Here's a Washington Post article about some of the very real consquences of Katrina beyond the obvious.

Quote:

• on coffee, which relies on the crippled port of New Orleans and its vast coffee warehouses
  
• Import prices for steel and tropical fruit, much of which flowed through Louisiana's ports, are also likely to spike
  
• oysters, four in 10 of which come from the waters off Louisiana
  
• price spikes for asphalt, roofing materials, plastic pipe, insulation, metals and concrete
  
• grain prices fell on word that harvests cannot be sent by barge down the Mississippi River for export
  
• Delivery firms such as DHL, United Parcel Service and Federal Express informed customers yesterday they would add surcharges of between 5 and 15 percent
  
• The premium that refiners charge to turn oil into jet fuel has shot from $3 a barrel at the beginning of the year to $25, pushing the effective price of a barrel of oil to around $95 for the already ailing airlines
  
• Airlines and attendant businesses such as car rental companies employ 10 million, and account for 8 percent of the U.S economy
  
• More than half the chemical industry's capacity to make alpha olefins -- a key ingredient in shampoo -- is in Louisiana
  
• Nearly half of the ethylene glycol -- used to make polyester -- comes from the region
  
• Roughly 12 billion pounds a year of ethylene capacity, about 20 percent of the nation's total, is shut down or operating at very reduced rates
  
• Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich., said that with a key plant in St. Charles, La., still closed, the firm has now run out of propylene oxide, used in products from sportswear to detergents to engine coolants. The plant will remain shuttered for weeks

We live in a complicated interconnected world, and our goverment needs to understand it and behave in a way that acknowledges it. The current administration doesn't, isn't, and refuses to acknowledge facts. They are not "reality-based"*.

*Remember that gem from a quotation in an October 17 New York Times article by Ron Suskind quoting an unnamed aide to the (current) President.

Quote:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."