Okay, let's talk about the evacuation. Since this keeps coming up, and is the main “blame” that people continue to lay on Louisiana authorities, I thought we need to review all this again. Part II will deal with the federal response after the evacuation, after local authorities were overwhelmed (as any local government would realistically have been) by the unprecedented disaster that was Katrina and the failure of the levees.
First: It is impossible to know three or more days out if a hurricane evacuation will even be necessary.
Second: It is impossible to completely evacuate an entire metro area of a million people in two days. Plain and simple. Impossible.
Third: FEMA's own Hurricane Pam exercise less than a year before Katrina estimated that, optimistically, New Orleans would be able to evacuate about a third of its residences. "This was a recognition of the city's poor population, with upwards of 100,000 living in households in which no one owns a car." (
http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/ops/hurricane-pam.htm )
Per Wikipedia: "Reports from the Associated Press state that 80% of the near 500,000 had evacuated safely from New Orleans prior to the hurricane's landfall. Even if licensed drivers had been available and the available buses had been used to evacuate the remaining approximately 150,000 people, they may not have made it to safety before landfall." (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina#Prevention_and_evacuation_issues )
YOU try evacuating 100,000-150,000 people in a day or two.
Let’s play a game: Just for argument’s sake, let’s say Nagin had ordered a city-wide mandatory evacuation at 10:00AM on Saturday. To order a mandatory evacuation earlier, when Katrina was a Cat 1 projected to hit hundreds of miles to the east, would have been utterly foolish (nevertheless, some of the lowest-lying coastal areas HAD been ordered to evacuate). But now, Katrina had ratcheted up to a Cat 3 and aimed more directly at New Orleans.
Just for argument’s sake, let’s say he had 200 buses, and 200 licensed drivers, ready to go. Forget that these school system (or city) employees have their own families to evacuate, and did not sign on for putting their own families and selves at risk of life and limb by becoming a bus driver. Let’s just say they’re ready to go.
To make the math simple, let’s assume each bus could hold 50 people, so that one “trip” of all 200 buses could get 10,000 people out of town. Okay, so where do you pick them up? Let’s also argue that the perfect plan is in place, and 10,000 people are waiting at pre-planned staging points throughout the 9th Ward, Mid-City, Lakeview and N.O. East to be picked up. This includes getting elderly and disabled people, and people without transportation, to a few pre-arranged pick-up stations around town (you really didn’t expect them to go door-to-door, do you?).
It’s 2:00PM Saturday, and all of this has been miraculously accomplished in 4 hours from the order being given.
So 200 buses, with 10,000 evacuees, head for the highways at 2:00PM. They’re on their way! Well, not exactly. You see, hundreds of thousands of other people are evacuating, too. The highways are using the seamlessly implemented “contraflow” evacuation procedure. It’s working great, and will result in 80% of the city getting out. Nevertheless, four lanes of I-10, both ways out of town, are at a near-halt. Assuming the buses don’t run out of gas before getting there (assuming they were able to get gas in the first place), they might just make it to Baton Rouge by 8:00 or 10:00PM (a drive that normally takes 2 hours tops).
Okay, so you’ve gotten 10,000 people to Baton Rouge (or Meridian, or Jackson…). Where do you put them? Well, find a few thousand rooms in the area… what’s that? A little matter of a few hundred thousand other evacuees who’ve already booked them? And a little matter of the bill? Well, what about the larger facilities? The Pete Maravich Assembly Center in BR could hold about that many (no, wait, that’ll be tied up as a triage center for N.O. in a couple of days). Hell, let’s just dump’em on the streets and head back down for a second load! 10,000 down, 90,000 (and one day) to go! Nevermind you’ve just left 10,000 people scattered in the coastal region with no shelter and a Category 5 hurricane bearing down. Hit the road!
You miraculously fill up with non-existent gasoline, and fly your fleet of magic buses over the four lanes of Interstate traffic that are all heading in the opposite direction. You make it to all the pre-established pick-up points, where your second load of 10,000 are all waiting in tropical storm force winds to be picked up. But no dice. The roads are closed once wind speed exceeds tropical storm force (and Katrina is only hours from landfall anyway). This is the part where the National Weather Service recommends that you make immediate preparations to protect life and limb.
So Mayor Nagin’s Magic Flying Bus Fleet was only able to get one tenth of the people who needed evacuation out of harm’s way (except they’re still IN harm’s way) before Katrina hits.
Are you getting an idea yet of how RIDICULOUS it is to expect an entire city to be evacuated, under ANY plan, with a two day notice?
Let's get serious again: N.O. evacuated 80% of its residents for Katrina. By any measure, that was an extraordinary success. The contraflow plan. The Saturday warnings (by Nagin and Blanco), in the strongest of terms, that everyone get out. These and other actions by local governments in Louisiana were directly responsible for saving thousands of lives. New Orleans lost 1,500 of its citizens, and that is horrible. But it could easily have been 15,000 if this hurricane had not been treated more seriously by the local authorities than any in memory. Can anyone cite an instance where a MANDATORY evacuation of an entire large city has been ordered in the United States in modern times? Can anyone say if it is even legal, or enforceable? No? I didn’t think so.
Perhaps if you do not live in a hurricane zone, you do not understand what an evacuation entails, and when it is merited. You always walk a fine line, and the vast majority of the time, a major evacuation turns out to not have been necessary. You get out as best you can, often at the last minute. Evacuating, or running to a shelter, when a tornado is in the area is an entirely different thing. It can be done instantly, and only results in a momentary interruption in the day (should it prove unnecessary). Evacuating an entire large city for a hurricane is something to only be done as an absolute last resort, and is not completely possible anyway.
Less than 3 days before Katrina hit (Friday, 8-26-05), it was a minimal Cat 1 having just crossed into the Gulf. Three days out, it was projected to hit The Tallahassee, FL area, still as a Cat 1. I suppose we should have evacuated the entire northern Gulf Coast then, huh?
By Saturday morning, when Katrina was upgraded to a Cat 3 projected to hit MS/LA as a Cat 4-5. THAT'S when I called my parents and brother in N.O. THAT'S when they decided to get out. THAT'S when most people decided to get out (if they hadn't already done so).
We who live in hurricane zones understand that it is impossible to predict when a "big one" will hit more than a day or two out (not to mention exactly where). We also know that not everyone is going to get out before a major storm hits. Everyone also understands that if they want to, they need to make plans to get out sooner rather than later, because if you wait until the day or two before a storm hits, you'll be lucky if you don't ride out 130mph winds in a car on the Interstate.
When Hurricane Georges side-swiped LA a few years back, 60% evacuated. It was (rightfully) considered a successful evacuation.
In all of my years' DIRECT experience with hurricanes (Betsy, Camille, Andrew, Opal, Erin, Ivan, Dennis), I have NEVER witnessed such a successful, and complete (as can be expected), evacuation of such a major city as before Katrina. I have also, however, never witnessed such catastrophic flooding from a hurricane (in New Orleans included, and I was boated out by the Red Cross in 1965 after Betsy).
Katrina was just too much.Completely evacuating a large city before a major hurricane hits is impossible. Barring a crystal ball, Nagin and Blanco's timing before Katrina was as good as it could possibly have been.
Although I no longer live there, I was born and raised in N.O. My parents evacuated, and my mother died as an evacuee in Shreveport, never to see her home again. My brother completely lost his home, 100 yards from the 17th St. Canal breech. I lost over 1500 fellow New Orleanians and the better part of my hometown in Katrina. I will go to my grave defending Louisiana authorities’ evacuation response to this horrible storm.
Beyond the evacuation, after the breaching of the levees (which the Army Corps has now admitted was catastrophic design failure), local authorities were quickly overwhelmed in their ability to provide rescue and relief. Any local municipality would have been. What Katrina and the subsequent levee breaches did to New Orleans was on the order of Pearl Harbor, of San Francisco 1906. September 11th, despite the horrible loss of life which is not to be minimized, only directly affected a few square blocks of Manhattan. After Katrina, the area of New Orleans that was flooded, and remained flooded for weeks, was SEVEN TIMES the size of Manhattan. There is no way any local government can have the resources to adequately respond to such a disaster.
Part II, to be posted shortly, will address what the federal government could have, and should have, done to bring rescue and relief more quickly… when it would have made a difference.
(Read Part II at: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2004887)
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