Ever since I was a teenager I\'ve been fascinated by hurricanes. Growing up in Virginia I experienced my share -- Agnes and Camille were the worst here when I was young, and Juan washed away our family\'s vacation cabin in the Shenandoah Valley. Because my grandparents lived in Tampa, every time a hurricane headed for the West Coast of Florida I watched and wondered what might happen to them. The weather channel was particularly bad for me because it gave me access to way too much information about hurricanes and I found myself regularly parked first in front of the tv and then later to my computer to check out the latest images of coming storms. We even suffered some damage ourselves from Isabel in 2004--a large tree down in our yard that, according to our insurance company, did $800 damage to our fence.\r\n\r\nBut none of this lifetime of experiences and interest prepared me for Katrina and Rita. Like most people who were not directly in the path of these storms, I could watch them spinning larger and larger on the screen as they approached land, and I could sit comfortably on my couch as the local weather forcasters had multiple weather-gasms--as though these storms were somehow going to effect the Washington, D.C. area. \r\n\r\nWaiting for Katrina and then Rita to hit was sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You know it\'s going to be bad and you know you can\'t do anything to prevent it, but you can\'t look away either. Who knew the train wreck would be so terrible this time around?\r\n\r\nI should explain that I have a strong personal connection to the New Orleans area, having spent several weeks there with a cousin back in the 1970s, then returning several times for Mardi Gras, Jazz Festival, St. Patrick\'s Day, and several business trips. I\'ve been float fishing on the Red River bayou, I\'ve accidentally run a boat aground on the beach near Biloxi, and I\'ve driven through Sulphur trying not to breathe the fumes. From all these experiences, I feel like I know the area better than most tourists, and had even planned to move there once upon a time before getting derailed by a job offer here. So when Katrina began bearing down for a direct hit on the city I loved so much, I found that I was even more glued to my screen than usual. \r\n\r\nAs the first news filtered in there was the relief that the levees seemed to be holding. And then the word reached us that real disaster had struck. Not only had the levees failed in New Orleans, but the damage along the Mississippi coast was even more catastrophic. My heart went out to everyone I saw on television and I poured over maps to see what I could learn about places I\'d known that were now either under water or obliterated.\r\n\r\nAs the days went by and the news just got worse and worse my horror turned to outrage and the mismanagement and total lack of understanding by the federal and state authorities. I found myself cheering at my radio when I heard Ray Nagan when he sounded off at the president, FEMA, and his own governor. I donated money to the Red Cross. I checked in regularly with my friends from Bogalousa to see what they\'d heard about their families who\'d been scattered by the storm. And, because I\'m a European historian, I read the European papers online and saw how Europeans were even more shocked than we were by the almost total failure of the emergency response here.\r\n\r\nIt\'s hard for me to imagine that it is almost a year later and tens of thousands of people are still displaced from their homes or are living in FEMA trailers. I can only hope things will get better sooner rather than later and that maybe when the country\'s attention refocuses on the Gulf Coast in August that lots more people will feel the anger I still feel about this.