Good advice apparently unheeded.

Glenn Reynolds had a column over a year ago that should have been gospel to local officials:

We could put more money into this sort of thing in general (as the pointy-headed boss in Dilbert puts it, "concentrating our resources across the board"), but we're already putting in a lot -- according to the CBO report, spending on homeland security has more than doubled since 2001 -- and it's likely that more money would just be wasted. There's only so much money a government mission can absorb in a short period of time, and my guess, buttressed by some news stories of homeland security pork-barreling, is that we're already past that point.

So what should we do? And -- perhaps more importantly -- who's "we" in this context anyway? Maybe it's not the federal government's job to anticipate every possible problem.

Where natural disasters are concerned, it seems only fair that individuals and local communities should take a hand in looking after themselves. One thing that the Homeland Security Department does that's clearly not a waste of money is to provide advice for individuals on how to prepare for disasters, natural and artificial, at its Ready.gov website. I've written columns on the subject myself (here's one), and there's loads of information on the Web about survival and disaster preparedness. Whatever the federal government does, there's plenty of room for the rest of us to prepare ourselves.

Indeed.