This seems to be an honest timeline:
Katrina Timeline

For comparison's sake you may also want to check out this one:
http://www.brookings.edu/fp/projects/homeland/katrinatimeline.pdf

Excellent information.
On a related ,but slightly off topic note, check out http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2043db0e-6342-4299-b75a-08662567f4f6

I know I will sleep soundly with this knowledge....NOT!

http://nydailynews.com/front/story/345064p-294496c.html

"WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is buying campers all over the country and shipping them down South to house homeless victims of Hurricane Katrina. About 128,000 "mobile houses" will become home for the displaced for at least 18 months, said Melissa Price, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said yesterday."

An excellent article titled "Private FEMA" at the Wall Street Journal, http://tinyurl.com/auxm8 , contains some interesting information on the scale of the business community's response to Katrina. It's hard to excerpt, because every paragraph is interesting. Here's the beginning and the end.

"In time we'll find out what went wrong after Katrina hit, but it's not too early to start drawing attention to what went right. Near the top of any list should be the remarkable response of the business community. It's had a lot to do with the relief effort's successes.

[...]

"Granted, a FEMA is never going to operate with the agility of a FedEx. FedEx and the others perform at this level 24/7; that's the nature of competition. That said, surely there are lessons here worth learning and attempting to transfer to the public sector. And we don't mean three years from now after another round of reassessment and performance reviews. The challenge of reconstruction is now. It wouldn't hurt if the responsible public agencies asked the private participants in the rescue operation for some pointers on getting the next job done on budget and on time."

In the instances where FEMA "refused" something, please do keep in mind that they are coordinating efforts, and dumping, say, 500 new boats in an area may cause additional problems that those of us who aren't experts aren't anticipating.

For a good timeline, check out Rick Moran's post.

And for those interested, I have a host of posts on my site detailing FEMA's responsibilities, discussions of the response, legal discussions, etc. Try these three to begin with -- then take a look at yesterday's NYT piece.

Thanks, Jeff, Rick's timeline is fascinating. He concludes that:

"This was a failure of leadership and competence. But it was also a failure of will. And for that, you need look no farther than the mirror in your bathroom, dearest readers. We elected this crew. We elected the Congresses over the past 25 years – Democratic and Republican – that failed to do the things necessary to make New Orleans safer.

"Elections have consequences. Consider that fact the next time you pull the curtain in the booth to cast your vote. If nothing else, the aftermath of this tragedy reminds us of that, then perhaps something worthwhile will have been learned."

I've been glued to wwltv.com (they are based in NO, stayed WAY TOO LATE so that the leftover crew had to go to a hotel as it was too late to evacuate, then moved to BR for the short term). They appear to have pretty even coverage (they LIVE there, they knonw the town, the players...) and they aren't screaming a whole lot about "what went wrong" they seem to focus more on survivor stories and what worked. They are a (I think) CBS affiliate so certainly the MSM mentality creeps in, but overall they seem to actually do their job, i.e. REPORT WHAT IS HAPPENING without the editorials.

Which is, I think, important.

Kerry heads South with planeload of hurricane relief supplies
AP ^ | September 12, 2005 | Staff
freerepublic.com>>>

Does AP mean John Who?