On Tuesday, The Times ran a front-page article on the chaotic efforts to clean up the oil washing around the Gulf of Mexico. Campbell Robertson reported on an incident in which boats that were supposed to be laying boom were, in fact, anchored on the wrong side of a bay in Louisiana. They were helpless as oil oozed in from the gulf, and BP had no way of contacting the workers to get the boats moving.

The article described a cleanup operation that is overwhelmed. “From the beginning,” Robertson wrote, “the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP.”

Some of the chaos was inevitable, once this much oil started gushing into the coastal waters. What was not inevitable, however, was the sense of insult and rage local officials now feel.

If you talk to elected leaders from Louisiana to Florida, they fill your ears with tales of incompetence  of advice that was not heeded, of red tape stifling effective operations, of local knowledge that was cast aside and trampled.