DJ Drummond has a helpful chronology of the hurricanes that we've experienced so far this season and how, before Katrina, there was a pattern of hurricanes not being as threatening as they were forecast to be. And it seemed, at first, that Katrina had followed that pattern. Remember Monday's news reports which all seemed to be of the "New Orleans really dodged a bullet" variety.

And all this was despite the fact that the Army Corps of Engineers knew early Monday as the storm hit that the levee had been breached.

The Army Corps of Engineers learned that the levee had broken early Monday even as the storm hit, but it was impossible to do anything about it before lake water cascaded unimpeded into the below-sea-level city for 36 hours, turning a really bad storm into an unimaginable abomination. There was no public announcement that the levee had broken until late Monday.

Did they tell officials that the levees were likely to go? So questions still remain as to why the local officials didn't use those school buses to move people out in the time between the storm's hit early Monday and the failure of the levees later Monday night. Captain Ed has more on the timeline and the responses.

There will be congressional hearings next week to look at FEMA's response. I'm not sure that Congress has the power to call in state officials and question them on their preparations and responses. Surely, those people are all busy now and perhaps we could wait a few weeks while they take care of what they're supposed to be doing. But we're a federal government and we need to know if there are major holes in the cooperation between federal, state, and local officials to deal with emergenicies. And wherever those holes are, we need to plug them up before the next emergency.