Susan Saulny and Jim Rutenberg write in today’s New York Times (emphasis added):

For months, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and other governors have warned that their state National Guards are ill-prepared for the next local disaster, be it a tornado a flash flood or a terrorist’s threat, because of large deployments of their soldiers and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, last Friday night, a deadly tornado all but cleared the small town of Greensburg off the Kansas map. With 80 square blocks of the small farming town destroyed, Ms. Sebelius said her fears had come true: The emergency response was too slow, she said, and there was only one reason.

“As you travel around Greensburg, you’ll see that city and county trucks have been destroyed,” Ms. Sebelius, a Democrat, said Monday. “The National Guard is one of our first responders. They don’t have the equipment they need to come in, and it just makes it that much slower.”

For nearly two days after the storm, there was an unmistakable emptiness in Greensburg, a lack of heavy machinery and an army of responders. By Sunday afternoon, more than a day and a half after the tornado, only about half of the Guard troops who would ultimately respond were in place.

In a nutshell, the governors of several states have been trying to get the White House’s attention on this matter for months, and they’ve been ignored. The needed equipment and personnel did get to Greensburg eventually, but the response was much too slow. When people are buried under rubble or need rescuing from rising flood waters, response time is critical. “Eventually” is not good enough.

The issue is not confined to Kansas.

In Ohio, the National Guard is short of night vision goggles and M-4 rifles, said a Guard spokesman, Dr. Mark Wayda. “If we had a tornado hit a small town, we would be fine,” Dr. Wayda said. “If we had a much larger event, that would become a problem.”

The California National Guard is similarly concerned about a catastrophic event. “Our issue is that we are shortchanged when it comes to equipment,” said Col. Jon Siepmann, a spokesman for the Guard in California. “We have gone from a strategic reserve to a globally deployable force, and yet our equipment resources have been largely the same levels since before the war.”

In Arkansas, Gov. Mike Beebe a Democrat, echoed the concerns of Ms. Sebelius. “We have the same problem,” Mr. Beebe said. “We have had a significant decrease in equipment traditionally afforded our National Guard, and it’s occasioned by the fact that it’s been sent to the Middle East and Iraq.”

Today on the Right Blogosphere, a number of bloggers are using highly cherry picked facts to pretend there’s no problem at all. If someday they are the ones buried under rubble and waiting far too long for rescue, however, I suspect they would reconsider.

Perhaps people who have never themselves lived through a real disaster — natural or otherwise — simply can’t think past the disaster itself to understand that the response to the disaster can be critical to saving lives. And getting people, infrastructure, schools, businesses, and communities back on their feet as quickly as possible can be critical to economies.