So many things went wrong in the government’s suck­tas­tic response to Hurricane Katrina, it’s hard to know where to begin to make fixes. One place might be the basics — com­mu­ni­cat­ing, and get­ting a sense of the scene.
In the days after the storm, while the feds and local offi­cials floun­dered, ham radio oper­a­tors and teams of guer­rilla geeks took it upon them­selves to keep Katrina sur­vivors informed. Drone-​​makers sent unmanned spot­ters into the skies above New Orleans, to get a look at the dev­as­ta­tion.
The efforts — and so many oth­ers like them — were beyond inspi­ra­tional. But the impact of these self-​​starters was muted, because they couldn’t share infor­ma­tion or resources all that well. The infra­struc­ture (both hard­ware and soft) just wasn’t in place.
That’s the prob­lem a dis­as­ter response drill, con­ducted last week in San Diego, aimed to cor­rect. Everyone from IBM to Sprint to Google to U.S. Joint Forces Command par­tic­i­pated in the test, called Strong Angel III. And every­thing from inflat­able anten­nas to high-​​speed wire­less net­works to text-​​message news feeds to games for human­i­tar­ian aid was tried out.
It didn’t all work per­fectly, as the New York Times notes.

Last Monday, the group began to assem­ble a makeshift com­mand cen­ter at an aban­doned build­ing near the San Diego air­port. But a state-​​of-​​the-​​art wire­less net­work, intended to route video images, satel­lite map coor­di­nates and other data from an impres­sive array of mobile com­put­ers, soft­ware analy­sis tools and com­mand pro­grams failed to come to life.
“Finally I said, ‘Lights out! Everyone turn every­thing off and lets start over,’” said Brian D. Steckler, a com­puter sci­en­tist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who was in charge of more than a dozen inter­lock­ing net­works at the heart of the com­mand cen­ter.
Hundreds of com­put­ers and even cell­phones were shut down, and then the net­work was slowly turned back on, seg­ment by seg­ment. Too many high-​​bandwidth appli­ca­tions had clogged the net­work, includ­ing a pow­er­ful video cam­era and “rogue” trans­mit­ters set up by par­tic­i­pants intent on cre­at­ing their own mini-​​networks.

But Strong Angel did meet its #1 goal — to “map­ping and devel­op­ing” rela­tion­ships for dis­as­ter response. Programmers from Microsoft and Google, for exam­ple, teamed up “to allow shar­ing [of] a sin­gle set of dig­i­tal satel­lite maps seam­lessly and to over­lay event data relayed from emer­gency work­ers through­out the San Diego area,” the Times said.
Most observers, like Defense Tech pal John Scott, agreed if these projects take the main lessons of the drill to the heart — by keep­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion tools sim­ple, low-​​bandwidth, and platform-​​agnostic — they should be “hugely help­ful for the next dis­as­ter.”

Remember when the President said he didn’t think “any­body antic­i­pated the breach of the lev­ees”? Never mind.
“In dra­matic and some­times ago­niz­ing terms, fed­eral dis­as­ter offi­cials warned President Bush and his home­land secu­rity chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach lev­ees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and over­whelm res­cuers, accord­ing to con­fi­den­tial video footage” obtained by the AP.

Bush didn’t ask a sin­gle ques­tion dur­ing the final brief­ing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-​​to-​​be-​​battered state offi­cials: “We are fully pre­pared.“
The footage — along with seven days of tran­scripts of brief­ings obtained by The Associated Press — show in excru­ci­at­ing detail that while fed­eral offi­cials antic­i­pated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and else­where along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to real­ize they had not mus­tered enough resources to deal with the unprece­dented disaster.

Watch the tape, if you can. It’s absolutely gut-​​wrenching.
UPDATE 10:45 PM: Some of you are already ask­ing, “What does Katrina have to do with defense?” It’s pretty self-​​evident to me. But click here for an expla­na­tion.
UPDATE 03/​04/​06 5:09 PM: The AP issued this clar­i­fi­ca­tion to the story yesterday:

In a Wednesday story, The Associated Press reported that fed­eral dis­as­ter offi­cials warned President Bush and his Homeland Security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach lev­ees in New Orleans, cit­ing con­fi­den­tial video footage of an Aug. 28 brief­ing.
The Army Corps of Engineers con­sid­ers a breach a hole devel­op­ing in a levee rather than an over­run. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about flood­wa­ters over­run­ning the lev­ees, rather than the lev­ees break­ing.
The day before Katrina, Bush was told there were grave con­cerns the lev­ees could be over­run.
It wasnt until the next morn­ing, as the storm made land­fall, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had asked about reports of breaches. Bush did not par­tic­i­pate in that briefing.

To me, the “top” ver­sus “breach” argu­ment is largely seman­tic; what mat­ters here is that the folks at the top were told in advance how bad Katrina was look­ing. But, check out the com­ments, and you’ll read a lot of peo­ple telling you otherwise.

AP: “Federal Emergency Management Agency offi­cials did not respond to repeated warn­ings about dete­ri­o­rat­ing con­di­tions in New Orleans and the dire need for help as Hurricane Katrina struck, the first FEMA offi­cial to arrive con­ceded Thursday.“

Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA regional direc­tor, told a Senate panel inves­ti­gat­ing the government’s response to the dis­as­ter that he gave reg­u­lar updates to peo­ple in con­tact with then-​​FEMA Director Michael Brown as early as Aug. 28, one day before Katrina made land­fall.
In most cases, he was met with silence. In an Aug. 29 phone call to Brown inform­ing him that the first levee had broke, Bahamaonde said he received a polite thank you from Brown, who said he would check with the White House.
“I think there was a sys­tem­atic fail­ure at all lev­els of gov­ern­ment to under­stand the mag­ni­tude of the sit­u­a­tion,” Bahamonde said…
Later, on Aug. 31, Bahamonde fran­ti­cally e-​​mailed Brown to tell him that thou­sands are evac­uees were gath­er­ing in the streets with no food or water and that “esti­mates are many will die within hours.“
“Sir, I know that you know the sit­u­a­tion is past crit­i­cal,” Bahamonde wrote.
Less than three hours later, how­ever, Brown’s press sec­re­tary wrote col­leagues to com­plain that the FEMA direc­tor needed more time to eat din­ner at a Baton Rouge restau­rant that evening. “He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 min­utes,” wrote Brown aide Sharon Worthy.
“We now have traf­fic to encounter to go to and from a loca­tion of his choise (sic), fol­lowed by wait ser­vice from the restau­rant staff, eat­ing, etc. Thank you.”

No won­der DHS Secretary Chertoff now says that FEMA bungling, and not an inept local response, was the pri­mary prob­lem with the han­dling of Katrina.
THERE’S MORE: The LA Times has Bahamonde’s clas­sic response to a FEMA flack’s urgent request to give Brownie some more time for dinner:

“OH MY GOD!!!!!!!” Bahamonde mes­saged the co-​​worker. “I just ate an MRE” mil­i­tary rations “and crapped in the hall­way of the Superdome along with 30,000 other close friends so I under­stand her con­cern about busy restaurants.”

Defense Tech pal Kris Alexander works for Texas’ home­land secu­rity depart­ment. Which makes his blog absolutely essen­tially read­ing, now that a cat­e­gory 5 killer hur­ri­cane is about to put the whomp on the Lone Stars.
He runs down the rea­sons to hope and the poten­tial “fric­tion points” as the state gets ready for a rum­ble — from Texas’ 375,000 Katrina refugees to the hos­pi­tals that have already cleared out. Bottom line:

All of this is hap­pen­ing with­out one bit of fed­eral resources being com­mit­ted. FEMA is at the state oper­a­tions cen­ter, but its a state and local show right now. We never planned on FEMA sav­ing our bacon. And no this plan didn’t hap­pen overnight. It has taken years of detailed plan­ning to reach this point. Will there be screw-​​ups? Yes. Will we do bet­ter than LA and NOLA? Probably.
This isn’t meant as hubris. I feel that too many peo­ple, espe­cially in the left side of the blo­gos­phere, have rushed to defend the LA state and local gov­ern­ments. I dis­agree. I think they screwed up regard­less of whether or not FEMA/​DHS was slow on the draw. I don’t think, knock on wood, that any­one is going to drown and die in a nurs­ing home on the Texas Coast. 

THERE’S MORE: Kris reas­sures us that the big hos­pi­tal on Galveston Island is being evac­u­ated. But what about the “hot zone” biode­fense lab there?
AND MORE: The Journal runs down the gagdets you need to make it through an emer­gency (too bad they didn’t do it before I re-​​stocked my dis­as­ter kit). And Xeni has pics of the sonic blaster we’ve dis­cussed here before.
AND MORE: “Is it my imag­i­na­tion,” asks Kathryn Cramer, “or isn’t the use of sonic blasters as weapons to delib­er­ately inflict pain on crowds ‘tor­ture’ as defined in arti­cle 1 of the UN Convention Against Torture?“
AND MORE: John Little, from Blogs of War, works in down­town Houston. “I have a win­dow office on the eight floor of a build­ing in the Texas Medical Center. I have to assume that in a cou­ple of days I’ll have a win­dow­less office on the eight floor of a build­ing in the Texas Medical Center.” He’s got a great list of resources for folks look­ing to track the storm.