Washington ? Katrina is what classrooms call a teachable moment. Everyone is picking through the mistakes from all levels of government for lessons that will spare more lives and property when disaster visits the country again.

The needs in a nutshell: more, sooner, faster and, of course, better.

More rescuers and equipment, sent out sooner. An earlier and no-nonsense evacuation. Faster decisions on asking for federal help, and sending it.

And, this lesson: Do not forget the lessons of the past.

President Bush was among those who did, accepting first-blush reports that New Orleans missed the worst of the storm. His acknowledged “sense of relaxation in a critical moment” ignored his father’s experience as president 15 years earlier, when the initial accounting from Hurricane Andrew in Florida underestimated the savageness of that storm and response time was lost.

‘Back to the drawing board’

Republican Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, leading hearings on the early lessons of Katrina, captured the top-to-bottom scope of the federal review in the title of the investigation: “Back to the Drawing Board.”

Locally, officials have learned from the storm that supposed safe havens can become dangerous cesspools. They are taking a hard second look at whether they should rely on urban mass shelters, as New Orleans did at its Super Dome and convention center for those who did not escape.

Aghast at all the people left behind in New Orleans, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius ordered officials to scour cities in her state and identify, down to their names, everyone likely to be bypassed in an evacuation.

Milwaukee leaders realized they have no evacuation plan. The city of 580,000 had such a plan during the Cold War, but they cannot find it. “I’m not sure where it is or what it says,” said Steve Frank, leading a federally financed effort to improve the city’s disaster response.

More broadly, some have drawn the lesson that they cannot rely on the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the federal government itself.

“What can we do as locals that doesn’t rely on FEMA too much?” asked David Robertson, director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, made up of Maryland and Virginia municipalities around the nation’s capital.

The council is considering a network of old-fashioned sirens, learning from Katrina that the airwaves, the Internet and telephones do not get the word around when everything shuts down.

Reviewing issues

Among the issues under review are:

¢ Second responders. Katrina helped teach that the local police, fire and rescue teams responding first to an emergency can become victims of it themselves. This vanguard lost communications, equipment and much of its effectiveness. Plus, many New Orleans police officers went AWOL.

Troops often become the second wave. Their mass mobilization, days after a storm, usually is enough when most people have been evacuated, holdouts have survived the immediate crisis and people can rely on their own supplies until help arrives. Not so in Katrina.

In classic hurricane relief, “you assume that if you can respond in three, five, seven, 10 days, you’re doing pretty well,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think we have to add another concept to our framework, which is urgent response, not just fast response.”

¢ Federal responsibility. This already is a prime topic in Washington. The impulse after a calamity is to increase the president’s limited authority to order and enforce local evacuation.

“This is not just red tape,” said Richard A. Falkenwrath, former deputy homeland security adviser.

“This really gets at the heart of what the federal government is expected to do, and what it is capable of doing, when there is a serious situation developing,” he said. Strong federal intervention is not accepted easily, he added. “Many states would resent it mightily.”

Even with federal aid now pouring in, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has said he does not want outsiders telling the city how to rebuild.

Brookings scholar James B. Steinberg, deputy national security adviser to President Clinton, said states should yield some emergency powers if they continue their dependence on Washington for recovery.

“If you’re going to have to pick up the pieces, you need the authority to take the steps that are going to reduce the likelihood that those pieces are shattered into tiny little fragments.”

¢ Leadership. To many, Katrina taught that it is past time to scrub the politics out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Gary L. Wamsley, a public administration specialist at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, said: “A small and specialized agency of 2,000 or so persons should not have nine political appointees Senate-confirmed. It is a recipe for failure.”

A string of FEMA leaders came to the job through connections to the president or his aides. Wamsley, who hammered the same point after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, goes so far as to recommend a law requiring that top FEMA officials have emergency management experience.

The storm tested the new emergency management structure that folded FEMA into the Homeland Security Department, combining natural disaster response with terrorism defense. Katrina is prompting a fresh look at whether that combination was the right thing to do.