Coping with natural disasters

Charlie Whitaker on perfect.co.uk contrasts the American authorities' slow reaction to the New Orleans hurricane with the way they coped with earlier disasters 100 years ago.

He looks at the response to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and to the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Then he goes on to wonder what this obvious decline in the efficiency of government tells us about modern American society and politics.

Incidentally, the BBC Suffolk pages have eyewitness accounts of Britain's worst natural disaster of the last century, the East Coast floods of 1953.