Neither did Louisiana. Remember, most of the people in New Orleans evacuated ahead of Katrina.


The level of flooding is actually quite a bit higher in Iowa, a dozen feet or more beyond what New Orleans saw, as bad as the worst areas in Alabama or Mississippi during Katrina. The fact that it may drain away more quickly only matters in terms of property damage if you can't hold your breath long enough...

Iowa will be fine. They will need a lot of disaster assistance but their rural/farmer heritage will leave them well equipped to get to work and solve problems once the immediate flooding is over.

The flooding in the mid-west is in an area with mush lower population density. NOLA and parts of the gulf coast were densely populated. The numbers of people affected will be smaller and the area also smaller.

The area outside the flooding are largely unaffected. Travel a quarter mile away from the flooding and things are mostly normal. After Katrina the coast was devastated and the are for a hundred miles inland damaged. People inland had to save themselves before they could help those on the coast.

The average income of the mid-westerner is much higher than that in NOLA, one of the poorest areas in the US.

The mod-west is politically important in the upcoming election cycle. Federal aid will be swift and sure. The federal government will not be keeping rescuers and aid away from the people in trouble. FEMA simply failed to act in NOLA. Worse than that it actively worked at keeping rescuers and aid out of NOLA after Katrina. This aggressive let-them-eat-cake attitude was made possible because the PTB were of a different party than the locals and the gulf coast was not seen as politically important.

The flooding is terrible but help is on the way and the people are, on average, better off than the worse hit areas after Katrina. Expect to see the area rebuild rapidly.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

There were politically important areas hit by Katrina too; remember that the worst of the storm took place east of Louisiana in PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER. areas, and these did little better via FEMA. Also, "actively keeping rescuers out of NOLA" was the work of the state, which had control over access, not FEMA, which never had say in such things (roadblocks were the work of state police reporting to Gov. Blanco, not federal agents).

Perhaps the worst was the local politics: FEMA was afraid to send any money into NOLA for fear it would be stolen. That wasn't just FEMA; a friend of mine owns a structural engineering business and refused absolutely to do any work in Louisiana due to the corruption there (he'd almost gone bankrupt once before not to knowing who to pay etc). That won't be a problem in Iowa. Lesson: know who you elect! ... which may be why everyone who could got out of NOLA ahead of time.