Some of these agencies can't 'carefully plan or orchestrate' their way through a revolving door. You are giving these people way more credit/malice than you should.

These types of exercises are a lot of times done with oversight from the GAO. The GAO does not pull punches when it comes to letting people know how badly they screwed up or how screwed we all are.

I've lived in MoCo for my whole life (since the 1980s) and I don't remember ever having so many and such severe storms. Pepco's response to these types of events has always been awful its just that we've needed them more this year.