Katrina Overload?

It's full employment days in the news business. There are a blue zillion stories available to be written or reported from the Gulf coast, and our news outlets certainly haven't disappointed. In today's Washington Post there are stories about the environmental and economic costs of Katrina, how we continue to build communities and casinos in storm-endangered areas, why overseas disaster aid to the US is being held up, how refugees were welcomed at the DC Armory and schools throughout the region, what the President is saying, what members of Congress are saying, why they are saying what they are saying, who blames whom, and on and on. All this in addition to the hard news about the rescue and recovery operations. And repeated in every city with a newspaper. The Des Moines Register reports that Iowa was ready to accept evacuees, but FEMA can't get them to leave Houston. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports on a local businessman who chartered a jet, snatched up some refugees and brought them to California. MSNBC and CNN and Fox News are dutifully fulfilling their roles as the international equivalent of the local eyewitness news (car crashes and fires! Details at 11!), cutting to the helicopters when all else fails.

Danger! Overload!

Click! There goes the mental circuit breaker, tuning out the umpteenth report on how many people have e-mailed to say Michael Brown should be replaced (Question: How many people really know what FEMA is supposed to do?), or that dogs are languishing on rooftops, or that ... you get the idea. Aside from the guilty fascination that something else awful may happen, we're reaching saturation point on the news from the Gulf. That's not good. We need to know. We need to know how a major American city could fall apart, what it is going to take to put it back together, whether we'd be ready if another one hit. We need to understand why people died in the street in New Orleans, by understanding who they are in the first place. We need to know the real cost of draining the wetlands that have provided a historic buffer against Gulf storms, of building luxury hotels and casinos where a storm surge can take them out, of concentrating our federal preparedness planning on terror threats.

By the way, does anyone else think that today, with all our emergency apparatus fixated on the Gulf, is a prime opportunity for a terror incident? Just asking.