Watching this thing unfold reminded me a lot of the place I work at. We used to be a small family owned business with about 200 employees when I started there 8 years ago. We are known in our industry as being, by far, the most responsive to problems (which we pretty much created - but still). To get things done in our plant, you pretty much took a project and had cart blanche to cross department lines to talk to whoever and get it done. As a Field Service Manager, I could collaborate with my field techniciangs, draw up a part in the computer myself, take it to a CNC or Laser programmer and have the finished stainless steel or aluminum part in my hand within about two hours and on a flight to that location in another hour. We've since grown to nearly 500 employees over those eight years and our department lines are becoming harder to traverse. Our documentation of things still looks like it does when we were 20 people sitting in the same room working together - so we sometimes don't document enough. In other ways, getting things done takes more and more time, involves more people, and gets screwed up a lot more. This is a hard transition but we're working through it.

Obviously, our government hasn't recently doubled in employees - but what I saw in response to Katrina reminded me a lot of what I have to deal with daily. WHY in the WORLD does the state governor have to ask for troops before they will mobilize? EVERYBODY saw this hurricane coming. WHY would these people in charge sit there and ignore a serious situation because they haven't received a phone call from the right person (now THIS is like what I work with). Why wasn't that Navy hospital ship mobilized out of Norfolk as soon as we saw Katrina building like crazy in the gulf?

How long did it take us to get a Hospital ship to the Tsunami vicitims in the Pacific? I would say that our response to an international disaster is probably better than one on our own shores.