It was an iconic moment - the photographs of the President looking down from his hundred million dollar aircraft on the devastation of the poor areas of New Orleans. What did he expect to see? What had he thought was going to happen when the hurricane hit?

This tragedy was not only predicable, it was predicted many times over - by scholars, by emergency management officials and by every visitor who stood on the levees and saw the Mississippi River on one side and city on the other.

The Gulf of Mexico is a major hurricane zone. There is a lake to the north of New Orleans and the biggest river in North America to the south. Much of the city is below sea level.

Anyone could see that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen, and now the waiting is over.

I was in St Kitts, and only checking the news infrequently, when I learned of the storm heading towards the Louisiana coast. By that time the mayor of New Orleans had already ordered an evacuation of the city, and this seemed quite obviously the right thing to do. What I didn't realize was how little preparation and backing went into that order to evacuate.

We now know - and the city and state governments should have known in advance - that there were tens or hundreds of thousands of people who simply didn't have the resources to get out of town. They didn't have transport, they couldn't afford a bus ticket or a motel, and they didn't have insurance, so they were afraid to leave their homes for fear of looting. So they stayed, and hoped for the best.

Reckless fatalism is stupid but understandable in an individual; it's stupid and criminal in a government.

For the governments at all levels - city, state and federal - to have neglected to plan for the evacuation of all the people of New Orleans is one of the most outrageous failures of government in living memory.

They should have put 50,000 National Guard into the city before the storm even hit. They should have contacted all the hospitals and nursing homes instead of relying on the goodwill and competence of their owners. And they should have put those massive fleets of yellow school buses to good use - one of the most pathetic sights in the following days was the photograph of a hundred or more buses that could have been used for evacuation, up to their windows in water.

There is an emerging fiction that the disaster of Hurricane Katrina was not one event but two - a hurricane followed by a flood. The head of the Homeland Security Department, Michael Chertoff, made this fatuous claim when he said that the emergency management plans for New Orleans had coped with the first disaster but they were overstretched by a second disaster - the flood - following straight after it. And the insurance companies are attempting to escape liability by telling homeowners that the damage to their homes was caused by the flood (for which they were not insured) rather than the hurricane.

The flooding was a direct consequence of the hurricane. The hurricane damaged the levees, and the failure of the levees caused the flood.

To say that they were prepared (or insured) for the hurricane but not the flood is like saying they were prepared for an earthquake but not for the buildings falling down.

The disaster also showed up the utter stupidity of the U.S. attitude to guns. With the police gone from the center of New Orleans (through desertion and incompetence), total lawlessness reigned for a few days. That would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but when many of the population owned guns, and others looted gun stores to get them, a bad situation quickly became very much worse.

Search and Rescue personnel reported being fired on when they tried to help people. Even the police were unable to enter some parts of the city because of sniper fire.

Putting guns in the hands of the general public is a recipe for anarchy, and this was a significant contributor to the mayhem that followed the hurricane in New Orleans

The President and his staff are keen to avoid what they refer to as "the blame game". This is no game. If we don't find out what went wrong, there is little prospect of avoiding a repeat of the same tragedy. It's always the guilty who want to avoid blaming, because they know which way the blame is headed.

I have visited New Orleans twice - in December 2000 and again for Halloween 2004. I found a lot to like about the city - good climate, excellent food and friendly people - but the main reason it was so much fun to visit was that it was just so different. It can be difficult to find much individuality in American cities, but New Orleans had individuality written all over it.

John, Joey and Shaun on Bourbon St, December 2000.

Paddle steamer on the Mississippi, October 2004.

Friends have been talking of going to Mardi Gras in New Orleans next year as a gesture of support - pump a few dollars into their economy, add some momentum to the recovery and give the city a nudge back towards the wildly original place it always used to be.