Katrina: Dry Run Taught New Orleans Nothing
By Captain Ed on Current Affairs
Captain's Quarters
Marc from Cranial Cavity notes that the issues of evacuation had come to light before in New Orleans, almost exactly a year ago, in the advance of Hurrican Ivan through the Gulf. This report demonstrates that the problem experienced this week in The Big Easy did not arise from ignorance or a failure of imagination, but directly from incompetence in the city administration and specifically by Mayor Ray Nagin:
Those who had the money to flee Hurricane Ivan ran into
hours-long traffic jams. Those too poor to leave the city
had to find their own shelter - a policy that was
eventually reversed, but only a few hours before the
deadly storm struck land.
New Orleans dodged the knockout punch many feared from
the hurricane, but the storm exposed what some say are
significant flaws in the Big Easy's civil disaster plans.
Much of New Orleans is below sea level, kept dry by a
system of pumps and levees. As Ivan charged through the
Gulf of Mexico, more than a million people were urged to
flee. Forecasters warned that a direct hit on the city
could send torrents of Mississippi River backwash over
the city's levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of
human and industrial waste.
Residents with cars took to the highways. Others wondered
what to do.
"They say evacuate, but they don't say how I'm supposed
to do that," Latonya Hill, 57, said at the time. "If I
can't walk it or get there on the bus, I don't go. I
don't got a car. My daughter don't either."
Advocates for the poor were indignant.
"If the government asks people to evacuate, the
government has some responsibility to provide an option
for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim
of Mother Nature," said Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU.
Please note the date of this report: Septemer 19, 2004.
Nagin and New Orleans knew these problems existed almost a year before Katrina hit and the levees failed. In fact, both Nagin and Kathleen Blanco noted the failure of the New Orleans effort to evacuate people from the city.
Nagin also provided a quote which showed that using the Superdome not only presented known difficulties, but that the city had previously avoided using it for those exact reasons (emphases mine):
In this case, city officials first said they would
provide no shelter, then agreed that the state-owned
Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special
medical needs. Only Wednesday afternoon, with Ivan just
hours away, did the city open the 20-story-high domed
stadium to the public.
Mayor Ray Nagin's spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted
that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the
Superdome, but said the evacuation was the top priority.
"Our main focus is to get the people out of the city,"
she said.
Callers to talk radio complained about the late decision
to open up the dome, but the mayor said he would do
nothing different.
"We did the compassionate thing by opening the shelter,"
Nagin said. "We wanted to make sure we didn't have a
repeat performance of what happened before. We didn't
want to see people cooped up in the Superdome for days."
Not only did Nagin know that the Superdome would prove inadequate for shelter for any period longer than a few hours, he encouraged people to gather there without providing the resources he knew that shelter to lack. Instead, he ran off to Baton Rouge despite his responsibility to oversee the execution of the emergency-response plans and ranted at Bush for not reacting quickly enough to the disaster.
And the Exempt Media, by and large, have covered for Nagin's incompetence. Does anyone seriously wonder why?
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