Storm warnings.(hurricane katrina )

A YEAR after Hurricane Katrina and all the recriminations that followed in its wake, it's worth recalling how much worse this natural disaster could have been. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin predicted 10,000 dead in his city alone, and liberal activist Randall Robinson claimed that desperate survivors were eating corpses. But official fatalities for the entire Gulf region were fewer than 2,000. There was no evidence of any cannibalism. In the absence of a rescue operation that some, for partisan reasons, would like to pretend didn't happen, the death toll would have soared much higher.

To be sure, the actual result was bad enough: more than we could bear, to paraphrase what Rudy Giuliani once said in a different context. Yet the catastrophe's chief villain was not, for all its many inadequacies, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Nor was it racism on the part of the Bush administration. Nor still the all-purpose bogeyman of global warming. Rather, the main culprits were a flawed levee system and a lack of local preparedness. These problems existed long before Katrina made landfall and, in the case of the levees, were well known by those who made an effort to understand them.

Most of Louisiana's public officials have chosen to avert their gaze from their own failure, preferring instead to point fingers and demand massive federal aid. Their first funding request, for $250 billion, was so full of pork projects unrelated to Katrina that even Washington's congressional spendthrifts made jokes about selling Louisiana back to the French. But Louisianans weren't the only ones at the trough: Mississippi's ...