go to http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/
Click on the story, "Hurricane Katrina's Destructive Path," for an interactive Flash timeline of the hurricane's path.
Click on New Orleans on the map.
Listen to the quotes, from Bush, who sounds like a total idiot talking about "nobody knew", and from Nagin's infamous rant where he calls what's going on "amateur hour."
Compare. Contrast.
I see that, in response to the criticisms of Bush's comment that "nobody could have known," some people have decided to demonize Nagin. He's hardly a compassionate Liberal. Last year, he wouldn't let people into the Dome for Ivan 'til the last minute. He was afraid they'd wreck the place with graffiti, etc.
I thought they were going to demonize the Guv, but what with her call for prayers must have been a magic shield. I don't know.
If you run into people who suggest that there should have been mandatory evacuations on the buses that were sitting, unused, Earth has a message for them:
"hello, hello? This is Earth? Are you here?"
It was logistically and politically impossible to evacuate New Orleans without dedicated public transportation -- rail -- or many more highways. (Same problem with Miami, Tampa, Long Island).
1. You only have about 36-48 hours to have a clue if a hurricane threatens a large metro area.
2. Even then, there's a 600 mile-wide strike zone.
3. Charley was supposed to hit Tampa. A couple of hours before it was expected to make landfall, it veered sharply to the East and demolished Punta Gorda
4. Hence, the stupidity of expecting city officials to start forcibly evacuating long before a hurricane is expected to make landfall. They take a huge risk were they to make them mandatory, shut down a city's economy (businesses would be up in arms at having to shut down 3-4 days prior to a storm's predicted strike hour.) Since it could happen more than once and hurricane season is half the year, it is an even harder decision to make. Imagine if Tampa Bay had forcibly evacuated for both Charley and Ivan?
5. You only know with reasonable certainty (and even then, there's Charley and Ivan) about 18-24 hours in advance that a hurricane has its "sights" on a metro area.
6. At that point, were you to evacuate people on buses you almost certainly send people to their deaths.
here's why: You are confident that it's worth the risk 18 hours before. You start mandatory evacuations. You shut down the schools and all businesses, commandeering city and school buses.
Any sooner than about 18 hrs and the risk of political fallout if the hurrican veers in another direction is too great.
--Unless you have already spend a year preparing people for the fact that they WILL be evacuated, I'd expect it would take at least 6 hours to get the first few buses on the road.
--You must dispatch firemen, rescue workers, police, EMTs, whoever to start rounding people up who are ill, infirm, shut ins, television-less, recalcitrant. etc.
--ah, you should have hired and trained such personel, otherwise, you end up pressing the resources -- energy, ability to sustain extended periods of stress, etc -- of the very people you will rely on during and after the storm.
--Ok, so you should have raised many more tax revenues. Ooops.
-- You get your first wave of buses rolling.
--The roads are spilling over with traffic, now they really are.
--Accidents happen as people panic.
--The traffic chokes the highways as emergency crews try to get in. Now you are taxing emergency personnel, depleting their ability to deal with the storm and its aftermath.
--Cars and the busloads of evacuees are all stuck on the roads. People panic. Some may even get out and start to walk. Others will try to hijack cars and drive off-road. Police must pursue.
--Winds whip up, rain starts to fall (depends on where the hurricane is, south, eat, west?)
--When winds are high enough, some bridges must shut down
--More accidents.
--Now it's impossible for everyone who didn't leave before to get anywhere.
7. Thus, they'd be sitting on buses, stranded on highways, and even if they did get somewhere, where would they stay? The hotels, motels, shelters are filled to capacity.
8. The only way around this is to start mandatory evacuations, just in case, about five days before the expected strike time.
Preparation for and response to a hurricane inevitably HAS to be about continuity planning and disaster recovery. IOW, you can't prevent death and destruction. If you're a computer security person, it's the same thing as the adage, "the only secure computer is one buried 6 feet under." You can prevent only if you make a region "dead" -- uninhabitable, unusable, so locked down that you can do nothing with it.
You take risks. You can only mitigate and manage disaster, you can't prevent it. As such, you will put people in harm's way. For some cities, you can't avoid it entirely and NOT simply because it's a natural disaster. It's also man-made in the sense that we have chosen to live in these places. And, even if we don't live in these states, there are natural disaster risks in every other region of the country.
So, the focus absolutely has to be on how to respond to a disaster. It has to be that way, whether you get people evacuated 100% or not. Because the disaster isn't just about the hurricane, flooding, and tornadoes. It's about millions of displaced people in the event of a major storm. You can only _manage_ a disaster, you can't eliminate it. And, it's not just that a hurricane's damage will be greatest at the shore. Historically, the most death and destruction occurs inland. I'll dig out the numbers on that, but you'd be surprised at how many _other_ states suffer more death and destruction than Florida does when a hurricane strikes here.
The idiocy of thinking that something like this can be managed by a mayor is ludicrous. A mayor is hardly in the position to negotiate with his own county sometimes, let alone other counties and even other states.
Kelley
"Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."
-- rwmartin