Katrina compounded.

• Position: Emergency preparedness

The scope of the disaster that goes by the name Hurricane Katrina was difficult to fathom at a distance. All the video on TV and all the photographs and words in newspapers, magazines, and online cannot adequately describe the loss. A million people homeless, a death toll likely to rise over 1,000, a great city submerged, a region devastated--the enormity was too great to take in.

Even in the first seventy-two hours after Katrina came ashore near New Orleans, it became obvious that government had failed, at every level.

If ever there was an occasion for government intervention, this was it. People were drowning. People were stranded. People were cooped up in the Superdome and at the convention center in disgusting conditions. People on the highway were baking in the sun with no food or water or facilities or medicine. And none in sight.

The state and local authorities were woefully unprepared, and the Bush Administration responded with a lethal tardiness.

While Katrina was without question an extraordinarily vicious storm, the vast majority of people who died did so not because of Katrina but because of a laissez-faire federal government with skewed priorities.

"A rightwing government that strangles public expenditures for public works is largely responsible for what happened in New Orleans," says Paul Soglin, former mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, and past chair of the committee on urban economics for the National Conference of Mayors.

"It's not as if there wasn't any warning. Like Condoleezza Rice after 9/11, Bush told Diane Sawyer of Good Morning America that no one could have anticipated this disaster. Actually, a lot of people did. The New Orleans project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, Alfred Naomi, had warned for years of the need to shore up the levees, but the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress kept cutting back on the funding.

The most recent cutback was a $71.2 million reduction for the New Orleans district in fiscal year 2006. "I've never seen this level of reduction," Naomi told the New Orleans CityBusiness paper on June 6. His district had "identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls, and pumping stations," the paper said. But with the cuts, "Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else."

At the time, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu blamed the Bush Administration for not making the funding a priority. "It's extremely shortsighted," she told the paper. "These projects are literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana and they are [of] vital economic interest to the entire nation."

After Katrina hit, The New York Times interviewed Naomi. "A breach under these...