Doomed to repeat.

"I made assumptions about local capability that I shouldn't have made." That's what Wallace Stickney, who was director of FEMA under Bush I in 1992 at the time of the agency's first big failure, Hurricane Andrew, said when asked by Jessica Lee of New England's Valley News what lessons he had learned from the experience. What is maddening about this is that Michael Brown repeated the very same error when he relied on state and local response to deal with problems arising in the first 72 hours after Katrina.