11:27 A.M. - WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government should have pre-positioned more sandbags and helicopters in the New Orleans area before Hurricane Katrina struck so that repairs to broken levees could have started sooner, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday.
"In retrospect I would say yes, we could have, we should have, in anticipation of this," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock told a Pentagon news conference.
The people who would normally be up on the levees looking for weak spots and respond immediately were gone from the city," he said. "So that is one of the things that made it difficult for us to respond here.Were these folks that worked for the ACoE, state employees, or something else?