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"All of the cruise liner, Navy hospital ships, Marine assets, hovercraft, and rescue ships should have left Norfolk as soon as Katrina went level 4. All of those ships could have been 12 hours behind the eye following from the south of a known-to-travel-only-north hurricane."

Gandalf, you should know better than that. First of all, where is the historical precedent for that? I don't believe it has ever been done. That might be because it is not a practical idea. Hurricane's are not predictable, and deploying significant military assets pre-emptively every time a hurricane threatens this country would be completely impractical. Second, naval assets are not just tied up in port configured for rescue missions. It wouldn't do a lot of good to anchor a bunch of ships offshore that had little more than presence to offer to the fight.

Hey! Good to hear from you! The military assets I described and many more are there now, 4 Marine hovercraft just landed on the MI coast loaded with MREs and water. They could have been there days ago. The governor of any state has the discretion to federalize the response. Hurricanes Ivan, Andrew, and Camille all had active duty military (my brother was an MP in the 82nd Airborne at Camille) present for months doing relief work.

The 3 cruise ships were rented by FEMA on thursday, why the delay? They have a capacity of 6,000 passengers, full care, feeding, and shuffleboard.

Our response was disgraceful, the first three days are critical for life support and there wass virtually none.