Mayor Nagin (who, by the way, is kinda cute, in a Vin Diesel way) has been getting a lot of press as a put-upon hot-head. Everyone feels sorry for him, of course, and the way he took FEMA and Bush to task was refreshing (though his race-baiting and “guesses” of 10,000 dead are a bit overblown).
Now, I have friends in New Orleans and have visited, but am not au currant on local politics. I have been told the following, but don’t know if they’re true:
• Mayor Nagin has known for years that a storm might be coming, but the levees have not been repaired in 20 years.
• There was no evacuation/refugee plan in place (which, unlike levee repair, did not require government funds).
• The same day the Mayor ordered evacuation of New Orleans before the storm, he also cancelled bus, train and plane transportation, and did not provide any way for people to get out.
Now, all this is second-hand info, which is why I ask here: are any of these complaints legit? Nagin is doing a lot of calling for other peoples’ heads; should someone be calling for his, as well?
Possibly, but there’s nothing Nagin can do about that. Those are federal jurisdiction. That’s on Bush and LA’s representatives and senators who failed to fight for the funds requisition.
The mayor has to be held accountable for that, along with the governor and possibly the FEMA director (who gets a minority of the blame).
I have no idea if he actually cancelled it, or just didn’t provide it. On the other hand, buses have to be driven by people - people with probably no emergency evac skills and with families of their own that would have needed to be evacuated.
However, this should have been part of the evacuation plan and something should have been figured out long before.
After the attacks on NYC on 9/11/01, Giulliana became “America’s mayor” due to his leadership. I don’t think Nagin is going to be on the short list for Giulliani’s replacement in that position.
No, Giuliani’s calm was a big factor in that, and Nagin - whether justly or not - hasn’t been that composed. Giuliani was also able to walk around the disaster site and be present in that (telegenic) manner, and Nagin can’t because of the scope of what happened.
Many folks say that Katrina was an “inevitability”. I mostly disagree – Katrina was a lucky, one-in-a-million shot by Mother Nature. New Orleans had survived three other “once-in-a-lifetime” hurricanes over the last 50 years – Audrey in 1957, Betsy in 1965, and Camille (admittedly, a less direct hit than Katrina by a few miles) in 1969. Contemplation that a more devastating storm than these three could come to pass was likely taken no more seriously than meteor-strike planning.
Re: the levees – the Industrial Canal levee in the SE part of town flooded pretty much only the Ninth Ward of New Orleans and much of neighboring St. Bernard Parish. The devastation there was plenty bad enough, but it’s important to note that area-wise, much of New Orleans was relatively dry immediately after the hurricane.
What flooded most of the rest of the city the next day was a break in the 17th Street Canal, on the city’s NW edge. But that break wasn’t a structural collapse. A loose barge was in the canal supporting a nearby road contruction project. It slammed into the levee wall and cause the breach. This was extremely unfortunate, to say the least … but the way the incident took place is an indication that overall levee weakness was not an overriding issue with most of New Orleans’s flooding (Ninth Ward excepted).
Goat, overall. I have no doubt that Mr. Nagin cares deeply about his city, and, presumably, its citizens. I also, at this point, have little doubt that the pre-storm evacuation/shelter of last resort plan, and the first 72 hours of relief post-storm, was a FUBAR of historic proportions, particularly in the apparent failure to provision the last-resort shelters or provide a significant amount of public transportation for carless evacuees. As Mayor, he’s gonna have to eat a good proportion of the responsibility.
But the wetlands that act as a ‘buffer zone’ where hurricanes would lose some of their force have been receding for decades. Thus Katrina was inevitable. Not that the disappearing wetlands can be blamed on the mayor.
True, but “inevitable” in what time scale? I’ve heard estimates from the Army Corps of Engineers that the type of storm that would level New Orleans had about a .5% chance of happening within the next 100 years. I assume they were pulling numbers out of thin air – there was no data they could have looked at 15 years ago that would give them any real insight into just how likely a Katrina really was.
And now, with 20-20 hindsight, the odds of a Katrina-type strike are inflated in many people’s minds. People are also going back in time and applying selective memory.
Stand in one place on planet Earth long enough and a huge meteor will land on your head. Might take billions of years, but it will happen eventually. A Katrina strike was not quite as unlikely to hit New Orleans as a mountain-size meteor, of course. Question is – was it likely enough to commit major resources to the “problem”?
One can’t assign ‘likelihoods’ to known past events or states. That possibility WAS taken seriously by a boatload of scientists and engineers over the past 2 decades, and FEMA itself, just a few years ago. I’m sure that’s been well-documented in several of the other Katrina threads here.
Got a cite on that? In the 8 days since the 17th Street levee ruptured, I’ve read nothing about this in all the coverage.
So what you’re saying is that when a Cat 4 hurricane slams a barge into the levee wall and it breaks, that isn’t about the levee’s weakness. I can’t figure that out - ISTM that the force of the barge was stronger than the levee was able to handle, hence the levee’s weakness was very much the issue.
Unless what you’re saying is that in the event of a hurricane in or near New Orleans, a barge being near enough to a levee that high winds could slam it into the levee is a freak event, too improbable to be part of a reasonable assessment of risks involving the levees.
Barge traffic in New Orleans is far from my area of expertise, but don’t the local waterways see a LOT of barge traffic? Maybe that particular canal doesn’t normally have barges in it, but there’s a lot of rivers, canals, and lakes right there, and a lot of levees (formerly) keeping them out of New Orleans.
This is totally self-contradictory. Are you saying it was reasonable for them to think “well, we’ve been hit by three really big storms in the last 50 years, but there’s no way we could get hit by a bigger one.” Especially when so many different people had predicted or speculated about a storm coming by and doing just what Katrina did. There’s just no way that makes sense. If it was hit by three “once-in-a-lifetime” hurricanes, it should’ve been very clear that they were not “once-in-a-lifetime” at all!
I mean, that’s three “once-in-a-lifetime” storms in twelve years! I cannot fathom why, if the city and the region was hit by three such storms, why they assumed that was as bad as it could get.
This is by far the most legitimate argument. Evcuations were called way too late (about 24 hrs before landfall). There was roughly 60 hours of notice from the time stom tracks pushed their predicted landfalls 150 miles west to SE Louisiana.
Some parishes west of New Orleans (without levee protection) called mandatory evacuations at 9 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, August 27th. New Orleans should have followed that lead, IMHO. I know why they didn’t (too many previous “false alarms”). But still.
Because no one alive could remember worse. I don’t know. It was never countenanced.
Myself, for no other reason than blind faith, fully expect that a similar storm to Katrina will not hit New Orleans in my lifetime. Probably not even my 2-year-old daugher’s lifetime.
In this thread we have been debate how to correctly “fix” NO
So none of this is a big surprise. In FEMA testing just last year they apparently used NO as the worst case scenario.
This would make the building up of barrier islands and wetlands the #1 priority.
Levees alone really would be at best a short term solution.
**This would be the summary of what should be done. **
So, fix Levees, start barrier islands and wetlands project. Raise the lowest areas. Keep them as greenways until raised sufficiently high. Consider the entire project to be a giant R&D & public works project.
John Mace concerning Giuliani
He was on the scene, he had emergency plans, he called for the National Guard immediately, he called for NYC to be a no fly zone after the second plane hit. He requested fighters to protect the city. He put out an alomst immediate call for help to the Pipe fitters & steal workers to come down and help. They turned out in huge numbers. He had a crack team in place and everyone did their job.
On the Rudy G scale Mayor Nagin does not look to good or guilt free.
This disaster needs to be shared out to the Mayor, The Governor & The President but the grossest failures are Head of FEMA & Homeland Security.
The heroes are without doubt the Coast Guard units that were there immediately.
The doctors who voluntarily stayed and kept patients alive without power.
The Forestry/Games Commission was apparently out immediately in there boats.
(I never saw this on the news but my Sister-in-Law was at Tulane helping in the hospital and she saw Coast Guard and Forestry/Games Commission long before she saw NOPD or Nat’l Guard.)
I don’t understand why you are saying it like that in their defense. A Cat 4 or 5 direct strike on New Orleans was certainly much, much greater than a “one-in-a-million shot” on New Orleans. Numerous government and private studies predicted this happening if a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane hit New Orleans. Most predicted it as a near certainty within the next 50 - 100 years. I have been reading the studies since I started at Tulane in 1991 and I would have hoped that leaders at all levels did the same.
Katrina was that storm. Granted, Katrina shifted course at the last minute and caused a breech in the levee system in a more roundabout way but I hardly think that technicality should give anyone a pass. The warnings could not have been more clear. I just have a casual interest in the problem and I predicted what was going to happen to New Orleans at this storm as well as others did.
The levees are far from the mayor’s responsibility and if you think a city like New Orleans had a budget that could deal with it, you’re mistaken.
Comparng Nagin to Giuliani isn’t really fair to Nagin. 9/11 and Katrina were two very different scenarios. Giuliani didn’t have 80% of his city flooded, few if any lost their homes, he did not have evacuees to worry about, he couldn’t get faulted for pre-disaster evacuation.
I’m sure Nagin wishes he could have done better. But- nobody could have evacuated New Orleans. The logistics of getting that many people out in such a short time are not possible. You simply had far too many people without any transportation to get out of town in too short a time.
Of course each disaster is unique. A leader doesn’t look for excuses for what he “didn’t do”, he looks for ways to overcome obstabcles. I don’t see any evidence that Nagin did that.
OK, so not one-in-a-million. What would have been a reasonable assessment of odds, say, oh, a month ago? And would those odds have been enough to convince people to commit limited resources? Let’s not use our hindsight here.
50-100 years? Regetably, that was too vague. Remember, you are talking about dealing with a populace that was more or less in denial, and keeping its collective fingers crossed everytime a storm entered the Gulf.