"To consider Katrina and its aftermath a problem of preparedness rather than one of population security is to focus political questions about the failure around a fairly circumscribed set of issues. For the purposes of disaster planning, whose key question is ‘are we prepared?’ the poverty rate and the percentage of people without health insurance are not salient indicators of readiness of the efficacy of response. Rather, preparedness emphasizes questions such as hospital surge capacity, the coherence of evacuation plans, the resilience of the electrical grid, or ways of detecting the presence of E. coli in the water supply. From the vantage of preparedness, the conditions of existence of members of the population are not a political problem.” –Andrew Lakoff, Preparing for the Next Emergency, 2007