"Look, attacking Bush is your way -- it is easier than paying attention to the facts."
Umm, right. First you have Max and Bush calling and demanding a mandatory evacuation, events that didn't happen. Max was doing his job, he looked at what the models were showing and decided that the risk was very high, so he called. But to claim that Blanco and Nagin took a call from Bush just a couple of minutes before a scheduled press conference and then put together all that was needed to declare a ME with details of the plan shows a disconnect from reality. I think we can safely say that just didn't happen.
Are there things that could have been done differently at the local and state level? Absolutely. But evacuation in buses is something that has been studied many times with mixed results. For one, there aren't nearly enough buses. And, given the contraflowing, the buses are one shot, they can't come back for another load. Now true, it is important to get out as many as possible, and there were enough buses between the RTA and the school district to move 20,000 people.
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But that assumes you have drivers for those buses. Remember that the bus drivers are probably also intent on evacuating their families. Apparently there weren't enough drivers to handle the planned evacuation to the Superdome, so this is a real problem. Now I suppose they could have just handed keys over to anyone willing to drive a bus, but I don't think that will ever happen. While I think some effort in this direction should have been made, it wouldn't have made a big difference.
I think it was a real failure of imagination to not have considered the Convention Center as a possible evacuation shelter. They could have brought water and MREs there just like they did to the Superdome. That would have helped. In addition, given that the SuperDome was a designated shelter, they should have had sufficient generator capacity to power it, power outages during a hurricane are pretty common, if not universal. Ditto for the Convention Center. |
