Katrina and the Great Flood

Hurricanes, as natural disasters are one thing. They can't be stopped. Their fury and the destruction left in their wake are only preventable to a point. But the failure of the engineering systems, and the political systems and the human services systems that should allow no tolerance for such failure is preventable. This crisis - this debacle of government irresponsibility - should never have happened. And since it has, and since we allowed it, it should NEVER be allowed to happen again. Ever.

We have failed the Gulf Coast hit by Hurricane Katrina on August 29 and we have failed the citizens of New Orleans who were lost, or displaced or left completely destitute by our lack of competence and our lack of capability and our lack of compassion.

Yes, while the cost of a risk-free society may be exponential, as George Low, the late president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute once said, we should be far more thoughtful about the level of risk that we are willing to tolerate, and the degree to which we will allow our citizens to live, oblivious to that risk, in harm's way, when we know better. We cannot make such measured judgements and allow a single American citizen to bear the cost of those judgements with their lives. We must do better. They - and we - deserve better.