From my understanding, the cities, states, and disaster planners all had been saying for a long time that this was a disaster waiting to happen, and the predictions of magnitude were along the lines of what has been seen. Anybody paying any attention to this from last year's season would know the info was there, in the media and otherwise. The same thing is known about the Tampa/St. Pete area, and they also dodged a major bullet last year. After the close calls last year, they did start revising the plans, and the fact that things (evacuations and such) have gone as well as they have is testament to that, in other words it could have been much worse. Certainly not perfect, but consider the magnitude of the problem. One problem with the evacuations is that not everybody had the means to get out.

As for deploying their Guard units - it would be interesting to know just how much they had to deploy, given that a lot of guard units are fighting full time in Iraq. Not a political statement, just one of truth.

I also think that at the federal level, watching the storm come in and saying "gosh, nobody has asked for help in the correct fashion so they must not need it" as a ways to justify response is wrong. People at that level needed to be thinking a couple of moves ahead as well.