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From the diaries -- kos)
This is cross posted at ArchPundit, though this version is slightly updated.
Two pieces of information have become famous in wingnut circles over the last few days, but they are quoted out of context and completely miss the the extent of the preparation the City of New Orleans was undertaking for a hurricane such as Katrina.
The first piece of information the Right Wing Noise Machine is trying to argue is that the City of New Orleans didn't follow its hurricane plan as contained in the
The City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan Annex I: Hurricanes. The second piece of information is that the City of New Orleans had no plan for sheltering its citizens who did not have their own transportation with which to flee with portions of this article from the Times-Picayune from July 24th.
Join me after the jump...
There are several striking bits of information in a series of articles from the Times-Picayune over the last year since Hurricane Ivan was a near miss. Here are a four more articles that capture the major issues the city faced. Click
these links to
see the
full articles
over the last year.
One clear conclusion is that the City was acutely aware of the problem of evacuating the poor and others who couldn't get out, but didn't have the resources to do it. Even with the claims on Drudge regarding the buses being available, the reality is the City didn't have 200 bus drivers to volunteer to drive them. The young man who comandeered a school bus was great, but imagine just grabbing two hundred drivers and sending them in heavy traffic to evacuate--the number of problems involving accidents would only make a difficult evacuation harder. City resources were focused on securing the city and moving people within the city to shelters including the Superdome, an action that save innumerable lives and the Times-Picayune agrees. By choosing to move people to a safe site, the City was able to reach far more citizens than if it had simply evacuated people out of the City. With the Contraflow plan under way, there was virtually no way to get buses back into the city after dropping off individuals so any bus trip out of the city would have been a one way trip for a bus.
Most striking despite the attempt to blame the City, is this sentence in the Times-Picayune article
City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own.
That's right--federal emergency officials were a part of the plan. Why? Because everyone understood there was no plausible means to evacuate everyone from the City of New Orleans in the face of a disastrous hurricane ( John Tierney is delusional).
During Ivan, only 1200 people showed up at the Superdome. During another hurricane about 14,000 took refuge there as well. Since Ivan, the City improved it's plan and had city buses run routes for people without cars to places where other special bus routes ran people to shelters. This time, 20-30,000 people got there. If there was a mistake, it was not designating another shelter of last resort--such as the Convention Center (this would have helped additionally because there would have been some real security planned).
The State and the City were aware that a Mandatory evacuation would still leave at least 100,000 behind. There simply is no infrastructure to solve that problem anywhere in the nation. Knowing that, the City was working to retrofit the Superdome during its rehab to provide exactly the kind of improvements that would have alleviated the suffering--power sources, food storage, and sewage modifications.
Overall though, those who vote have their concerns most addressed and in Ivan's case the contraflow system was very poorly managed causing long delays for those evacuating. The State fixed that plan and those with the means to leave certainly had a lot of traffic to deal with, but it moved relatively fast. The Times-Picayune said average speed was about 45 miles per hour which is not speedy, but fast and orderly for an evacuation.
Those who vote are those people who could evacuate and politicians responded. What's stunning is that even in the case of the worst off, the City of New Orleans still worked to improve the shelter intake and provision system to give a last resort.
What is unbelievable is the federal government didn't have a contingency for evacuating those left in the City after the storm. The problem was known and the City did what it could do to alleviate those concerns and in the long term had plans to alleviate the problems even further. Katrina beat them to it though. Let's make it clear though that with the Hurricane Pam exercise, federal officials fully understood the Superdome was a refuge of last resort and as such would need to be evacuated after a devastating storm.
While Ray Nagin should have called for a mandatory evacuation earlier than he did, he issued the first mandatory evacuation for the City of New Orleans ever and seems to have achieved a higher rate of compliance than any previous evacuation with estimates ranging from 70-80%. His actions to open the Superdome and provide transportation to it saved many lives. The failure was when federal agencies that knew the plan then failed to provide for evacuation of citizens stuck there after a catastrophic natural disaster.
There are going to be thousands of mistakes to identify over the next few years. Everyone in the situation make some understandable mistakes given the breadth of the crisis. Some of those mistaked are not understandable and at a minimum we are seeing a flood of bullshit out of Mike Brown's mouth that seriously questions whether he is in touch with reality. Fire him now.
Updated 9/7 10:30 CDT