Before there was Hurricane Katrina, there was Hurricane Pam. You won’t find it on any of the lists of storms that have struck in the past. Pam was a 2004 simulation exercise with federal, state, and local officials to estimate the impact of a major hurricane on New Orleans. It predicted that the levees would be sw-amped. One million people from the area would be eva-cuated in time, but 300,000 or so residents, mostly the poor without transportation, would be left behind.

Pam was the alarm bell that should have alerted the Bush administration that its preference for tax cuts and defence spending over necessary domestic projects could have disastrous consequences. One government official who rang the alarm, Assistant Secretary of the Army Michael Parker, was fired for accusing the Bush administration of short-changing the Corps of Engineers. Katrina has proven that much of government is like keeping a roof in good repair: Planners should have insisted that local or federal government ensure sufficient buses identified beforehand and organised to go into neighbourhoods and help residents escape. But public officials whose views of government’s role have been stunted by decades of anti-government hectoring could have failed to see that a safe, swift evacuation was a job for government, not God.