Rick Hickman, American Press via AP
	Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, left, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, center left, and President Bush speak to the media in front of a damaged hanger in Lake Charles, La., on Sept. 27, 2005. Bush has since pledged a multi-billion reconstruction program for the stricken Gulf Coast.
	Pat Sullivan, Associated Press
	First lady Laura Bush hugs New Orleans evacuee Haikeem Washington, 4, at a day care center in Houston on a Sept. 19, 2005 visit. The president and Mrs. Bush have made a number of trips to places stricken by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in recent weeks.
	MORE COVERAGE Wider military role in domestic disasters met warily AP updates from the Gulf Coast
	Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word photo
	The Gresham house, center, now known as the Bishop's Palace, sits relatively unscathed behind a wall of debris following the hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, Sept. 8, 1900. More than 6,000 people were killed and 10,000 left homeless as entire neighborhoods were swept clean from The Great Storm. Heavily damaged Sacred Heart Catholic Church is at right. In the wake of natural disasters in the past, the federal government was expected to play a limited role.

In responding to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush has embraced a three-decade pattern of an increasing federal role in trying to make individuals, businesses and local governments whole after natural disasters.

For Bush, that has meant a willingness to allow the demands of unforeseen events such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes to override the conservative, small-government ideology he voiced on his way to the White House.

"The trajectory of response has been getting much bigger," said Mary Comerio, a professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, author of "Disaster Hits Home" and other works about recovery efforts.

The expectation of a federal role is a given in today's politics, as evidenced by the debate and criticism over the Bush administration's pre- and post-Katrina performance. But that expectation, at least in the area of long-term recovery as opposed to initial life-saving efforts, is relatively new.

While Congress enacted numerous ad hoc measures through the 19th and most of the 20th centuries to respond to individual natural catastrophes, the overwhelming burden of long-term recovery fell on state and local governments and the individuals affected. In the immediate aftermath of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Gen. Frederick Funston earned acclaim by leading U.S. Army troops to help keep order in the shattered city, but its long-term recovery was chiefly the work of local government and private charities. After the Galveston hurricane of 1900, still the nation's deadliest, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers helped construct the town's new sea wall, but again, the chief burden for immediate aid and most longer-term rebuilding fell on local shoulders.

The federal government's first long-term assumption of natural disaster responsibilities came after the massive Mississippi River flooding of 1927, when the Corps of Engineers began to build a system of dams and levees to contain future floods.

The Federal Disaster Act of 1950 created the first formal disaster relief role for Washington, but it was still seen as subsidiary to local and state efforts and was limited to infrastructure replacement rather than aid to individuals.

The major shift in the federal disaster role came in the deadly wake of Hurricane Camille in 1969, a time when the federal government was asserting and expanding its role on a variety of fronts, from civil rights, to the environment, to housing and poverty relief. Congress approved and President Richard M. Nixon signed the first assistance program for individuals, paving the way for the network of housing assistance, small business loans and jobless benefits and education assistance that are now assumed as obligations of the federal government.

"The social conditions were ripe; it was in the context of the '60s,'' noted Theodore Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University. "It was a time when there seemed to be a consensus on the idea that the federal government could use its vast financial resources to advance the common good."

Bush, in his post-hurricane speech in Jackson Square, pledged a veritable Marshall plan to rebuild the stricken coast. Beyond the anticipated arsenal of disaster recovery efforts, he pledged federal steps to address the conditions of poverty so starkly displayed in the coverage of Katrina.

He called for a Gulf Opportunity Zone that would seed growth through tax breaks for employers, an urban homesteading plan that would allow displaced families to build homes on vacant federal land, and education vouchers for students scattered from their school districts. Bush did not put a price tag on any of this. In a subsequent news conference, he said, "It will cost what it costs.''

"What Bush is talking about is a massive economic development effort which speaks as much to the issues of declining industry and declining populations. That raises a whole different set of questions," said Peter May, a political scientist at the University of Washington, who has written extensively about federal disaster relief policies.

Congress quickly approved $62 billion in an emergency appropriation for hurricane victims within days of the storm. Advocates for the devastated region have called for a total package of aid in excess of $200 billion. By comparison, that would be close to the total U.S. spending on World War I, adjusted for inflation, although less than the current cost for the U.S. defense bill in Iraq and Afghanistan, estimated at roughly $250 billion to date and counting.

Among other unanticipated outlays before Washington in recent decades is the roughly $20 billion promised New York City to recover from the attacks of 9/11.

The sheer size of the anticipated spending for Katrina raises immediate questions, apparent in congressional hearings last week. How will a federal budget already deep in deficit be able to sustain such spending? Will other programs have to be pinched to pay for the recovery? How can such a vast amount of spending be monitored to be sure that it is used effectively?

Post-disaster spending in recent decades has been notorious for abuse and waste. In hearings last week, members of Congress raised questions about the effectiveness and the apparent lack of coordination over initial spending.

But even if government spending in the coming months and years is effective in providing relief to stricken individuals and communities, disaster experts point to the vexing longer-term question of whether an effective response to one disaster may, paradoxically, increase the overall dangers and costs to society from the natural disasters that are certain to occur in the future.

"You don't want it to be an open-ended handout," said May. "You want to create incentives for people to act wisely."

In testimony before a U.S. House committee last month, William A. Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, said, "Congress faces a dilemma: the commendable incentive to be generous to the victims of a natural disaster may increase the costs of future disaster, both to the local resident and to the U.S. Treasury."

He warned of the danger of a "moral hazard," whereby generosity promotes risk, "by increasing the expectations of local residents and governments about the future federal response."

The danger is, Niskanen said, that people will rebuild in dangerous areas with the expectation that the federal government's deep pockets will bail them out, even in situations too risky for private insurance.

"That's a tough issue," Berkeley's Comerio said of the moral hazard argument. "It is a real concern for those of us in the research community. On the other hand, you have the reality of people in need." The issue of creating incentives to decrease risks is one principle behind the federal flood insurance program, although one that is enforced haphazardly in the view of many disaster experts.

Federal flood insurance first became available in the late 1960s. By the 1990s, its requirements were toughened to discourage development in vulnerable areas and to encourage protective steps such as elevating houses in areas where floods and storm surges are a threat, such as the communities along the Gulf coast raked by Katrina.

But the chief responsibility for enforcing those requirements usually falls to local officials often cross-pressured by other priorities. One, cited by experts, is the understandable rush to rebuild after disasters. Another is the pressure by developers trying to hold down their costs.

"The truth is that Congress has lacked the political will to enforce it," Steinberg said of the disaster protections envisioned in the tougher regulations. "The federal governmental stepped in and said we're going to subsidize your insurance in return for certain things, but the other part of the bargain often hasn't materialized."

A similar syndrome was seen in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The storm, whose property damage was then considered a record at approximately $40 billion, prompted Florida to enact a stringent building code for areas deemed most vulnerable to hurricane damage. But the cost of the code led communities in the Florida panhandle to lobby for exemptions from the toughest requirements on the theory, challenged by recent events, that they were less hurricane-prone than southern Florida.

But generations of growth and development on the nation's coasts, not to mention in the urban areas on earthquake fault lines in the west, guarantee that devastating damage from natural events will be a recurring problem.

"Even though you can improve the technology and the building techniques, you're still going to have more people in harm's way," said Comerio. In the meantime, private insurance is increasingly difficult to obtain for disaster protection and no one has forged a consensus on any sort of comprehensive federal disaster insurance.

While neither Katrina nor Rita nor the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake could have been predicted themselves, Steinberg argues, it's a certainty that earthquakes will happen over time, and devastating hurricanes will hit.

"The point that has to be made is that national disasters are, in the aggregate, predictable, and we can budget for them," said Steinberg, the author of "Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disasters in America."

"The reason that these [congressional relief measures] are always done as supplemental appropriations is the idea that these are unpredictable acts of God ... we need to overcome our collective denial about natural disaster and we need to budget for it and prepare for it, and if we did, we'd have a more civil and just society."

The reasons for the lack of such preparation include not just lack of imagination but the inevitable political tendency for lawmakers to defer painful choices until forced to confront them.

"Disasters -- flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, and so on -- have a schizophrenic political life," said May. "Before, or between, events you don't have people marching on city hall or state capitol steps saying, 'Save us from the hurricane, earthquake etc.' "

But afterward, as the events of last month demonstrated anew, come calls for immediate action and spending.

"The political dilemma in attempting to invest funds, create regulatory programs, or other efforts to avert losses in the first place stems from the fact that the costs [or burdens] are up front, while the benefits are longer term and uncertain," May said.

Even if the benefits are uncertain, the costs of future disasters are certain, these experts warn -- and certain to be greater as long as they are dealt with on an ad hoc, emergency basis.