An UNNATURAL DISASTER; they knew thousands would die

[DemBones DemBones]

when a big hurricane hit New Orleans. They knew there were about 100,000 poor people who would not be able to leave NO on their own. Their evacuation plan was very weak.


"In an evacuation, buses would be dispatched along their regular routes throughout the city to pick up people and go to the Superdome, which would be used as a staging area. From there, people would be taken out of the city to shelters to the north.

Some experts familiar with the plans say they won't work.

"That's never going to happen because there's not enough buses in the city," said Charley Ireland, who retired as deputy director of the New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness in 2000. "Between the RTA and the school buses, you've got maybe 500 buses, and they hold maybe 40 people each. It ain't going to happen."

<snip>

"So, if one does the math, 500 busses times 40 people per bus yields 20,000 people that could have been evacuated in a best-case scenario. Only 20,000 out of 100,000. That isn't a half-hearted effort, it's a one-fifth hearted, criminal effort. We're talking about the lives of 80,000 people or more sacrificed, from a disaster that was certain to happen. By not having a plan to get New Orleans' poor out, our government caused the unbelievable suffering and the needless deaths of thousands of Americans. This was not a natural disaster caused by an act of God, it was an unnatural disaster. In his excellent 2001 book, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, Ted Steinberg writes: "Calling such events acts of God has long been a way to evade moral responsibility for death and destruction." He shows in the book how countless politicians over the past one hundred years have done their best to evade this moral responsibility when preventable disasters struck. Our current leaders are no different."


more in meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters's blog at Weather Underground (yes, it's a weather site.)

http://www.weatherunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=94&tstamp=200509

Thanks to ELORIEL, from whom I learned of this.


Will the 10,000 body bags the city ordered be enough???

[SheilaT]

1. There is probably no city

in the U.S. that truly has the infrastructure to truly evacuate the entire population. Every city has thousands who don't have cars, although the numbers of those without cars is greater in New Orleans that in any other major city.

The real issue is not whether the city could or should have been fully evacuated prior to the storm hitting, but the indifference to the suffering and the lack of response afterward. Supposedly FEMA had supplies and personnel in place. Well, why didn't they come in immediately? Why weren't people evacuated from the Superdome and the Convention Center starting no later than Wednesday? Why weren't basic supplies airlifted into those places?

I could go on and on, but you all know exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah, it was a huge job and difficult, and with the best response in the world more people still would have died, but not in the numbers that have occurred.

[DemBones DemBones]

2. But every city SHOULD be able, backed by the federal government,

to evacuate its population when necessary. Every city SHOULD have a plan, should know what they can do with their resources (buses, trains, whatever) and the federal government should know how much additional help every city would need.

Don't you think it would be best if FEMA came in BEFORE a disaster occurs? When a disaster can be accurately predicted, why shouldn't they be in place? It was known that Katrina would likely hit New Orleans, definitely hit somewhere on the Gulf Coast, and cause catastrophic damage.

I'm not sure if it was Chertoff or Brown (I think Brown) who said, as if to excuse this massive screw-up, "Well, we're not prepared for an A-bomb, either."

THAT statement alone should get him removed from his job. Bush's habit of appointing incompetent cronies has got to be checked. Congress needs to tell him so and make sure he listens, because we had better be prepared for an A-bomb or a hurricane or an earthquake.

Bottom line: The federal government is supposed to protect the citizenry.

[Igel]

3. Blanco referred to the state evacuation plan.

There is one. It sucked.

Order of precedence:

City government uses its resources; if those are insufficient,
the State government uses its resources; if those are insufficient,
the US government uses its resources.

Buses with bathrooms, for pity's sake.

The wise thing--only in hindsight--would have been to order the evacuation earlier. If everybody predicted levee failure (few did), and everybody was concerned about it, why wait?

Why did Blanco say that * called and "appealed" for them to order a mandatory evacuation before they ordered one? That's just embarrassing.

If you evacuate, and there's no need, a load of shit hits the proverbial fan, and spatters those who ordered it, that's why. CYA.