I'm 145 miles north east of Houston. Hurricane Rita cleaned our clock and found a large number of people fleeing from the coast stuck here. We were stripped of fuel and there was no resupply for 5-6 days.
Walmart closed due to people fighting over the dwindling items on the bare shelves. They used bundled cardboard to barricade the entrances.
The entire area was without electricity. We had a generator and gas to run it and sat this out quite comfortably. The vast majority did not. It was an ugly ordeal that pitted those fleeing against the locals. The local law enforcement was over run badly. Luckily, it's a large state and troopers from all over were sent to help maintain order. They had to escort gasoline tankers in. People were going berserk. The hotels were full and their gas tanks were empty.
Rita came in on the heels of Katrina. We evidently learned little from Katrina, as this whole area was a mess. The evacuation was horrible. People ran out of fuel, as traffic was inching along all the way from Houston to here.
That's one single event that we saw coming days before land fall.
Maybe you have top witness such to fully realize just how bad off we were. I tend to look at the smaller picture now, rather than the long range, such as peak oil.
Of all things that can go badly this was just a blip.
To be fair, half the people who had to evacuate from Rita were people who had already evacuated due to Katrina. It was one helluva double whammy.
I was in the 82nd Airborne in '05 and spent a month in Nawlins as part of the relief effort. After about 2 weeks, Walmart was open and stocked, and McDonalds was back to cranking out cheeseburgers.
Too many of the people of New Orleans felt that nothing bad could happen to them. Too many more people there were dependent on Government handouts that took far too long to get to them. The lawlessness of the city was ridiculous. Posse Comitatus was almost suspended, but a few vagrants shot down by the National Guard quelled most of the idiots shooting at each other within the first week. The Posse Comitatus act was changed in October 2006, giving the federal government far more leeway to use the military domestically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act will give you more information.
When it comes down to it, what the people of New Orleans took for granted, government assistance, failed them. But their biggest mistake was to stay in the city in the first place! I don't think I have to explain to any member of this community that a threat as big as Katrina should have sent everyone packing. There's no excuse for the fact that hundreds of buses didn't leave New Orleans filled with evacuees due to the fact that NO Evacuees showed up to take them!
Ok, on the whole, I feel that our modern society is far better able to deal with any variety of short-term disaster. Society as a whole, that is. Members of this community are far better able to deal with these types of situations as individuals. The sheeple will be fine as long as there is no "permanent" damage to infrastructure. They will survive without electricity and running water for a week or two. It won't be easy, they won't like it, but they'll survive. Walmart will reopen, and they can go back to pleasantly chewing their cud, having survived a horrible ordeal, while the rest of us will return to our normal lives knowing that another ordeal survived us.
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