Well most people see preparness and disaster relief as responsibility of goverment. So it's natural for those people to blame the goverment when things go wrong.

i agrea that people should have some responsibility too. The US is going a reasonable job at trying to educate and get people involved in to emergency preparness and stuff. Much more than mine goverment is doing. Mine goverment ( holland ) is doing almost nothing to educate people about emergency preparness. One of the reasons is not to scare people too much. Personally i think ignorance would be more dangerous... Instead they invest huge amount of money to prevent things. So the chance people need emergency equipment and skills would be considerable less.

Due to the very diffrent methode of orginasation, you really can't just compare one country's system with the other.