The scale of the disaster in Darwin was minuscule compared with that caused by Katrina. Darwin bears virtually no similarity to New Orleans and it’s fatuous to imply that we would deal with a Katrina scale emergency any better than the Americans did. Mr Pratt fails to mention that Darwin was blown away, not flooded, and that vehicular movement was at all times possible. If you read Alan Stretton’s book “Soldier in a Storm”, you’ll see that not everything went off quite as smoothly as all that. Stretton was forced to intervene when a local Aborigine was hauled before a magistrate for some trivial offence that clearly showed that racism was just as close to the Darwin surface then as it was in New Orleans 30-odd years later.