and by phone steve coll of the new yorker magazine. i am pleased to have all of them here at this table. steve, this is what you have said. new yorkers like to tell stories about their extraordinary resilience. there's truth in these stories as we've seen in the past few days. the rescue and cooperation devastated communities. the absence of looting the well rehearsed emergency response protocols by many institutions and government. there is a collective sense of denial too about how poorly presented the city is for events of this scale. how poorly prepared have we been, steve? >> well, very, especially about flood waters. irene, tropical storm irene was only six months ago and the water, you remember, washed right up to the top of the battery but didn't come over. it wasn't hard to image then what a surge of ten or 11 or 12 feet higher might have done. and yet, it seems, and we'll have time to sort all of this south when we get through this emergency, that very little was done to protect underground infrastructure from a very predicta