Getting people supplied with the basics is a good start. Food and water, shelter, clothing, medical care. Some stability. The biggest problem at this time is communication. Nobody knows where to go for help. Nobody knows where to send them. There seems to be no coordinated evacuation. Yes, it's true they should have left before the hurricane but they didn't. Now people who survived the storm are dying from neglect. We may find that as many or more people were lost after the storm passed. That is unacceptable. The New Orleans city administrators should be held criminally liable for such poor disaster preparedness. They have been warned for decades that this is coming and they did not prepare worth a damn. The Feds seem to be taking a lot of shit for this but the responsibility for the safety and security of the citizens of New Olreans lies with New Orleans city hall.
Another problem is people are in dispair. They have lost everything and have no idea how to start over. They need hope. A good start for them is to put them to work rebuilding once they have their basic needs met. Relocate them to a camp and truck them in to begin work cleaning up. Find one of those closed military bases and put them to work building their own camp or refurbishing abandoned infrastructure.