We must look back at all of the components and contributing factors that may have seemed unrelated, but which we can see today are anything but. This means starting at the mouth of the river and tracing all the tributaries, in order to effectively analyze the terrain. 

Take bad policy, add bad politicians, decaying infrastructure, pulled funding, bad management, institutional failure, anomalous and disaster-level weather, mismanaged funds (we'll call it that), mismatched skillsets (we'll call it that), yes incompetence, yes lack of preparedness, and inability to distinguish priorities…Now add malfeasance. And you don't even need to add that much malfeasance at that point.

It's never as easy as "blame" or "fault" or stringing up the bad guy, and then we can all go home. This is a policy problem and a system problem, which is way bigger than any one individual in that system. Tug on that thread and the whole sweater comes undone. However, if you want to peel back the layers and unwind the architecture and infrastructure, this does lie squarely at the feet of our elected officials.