Give me a cite, now. From what I’ve read about this, which is far from everything that’s been written about it, public transportation was halted; no alternate transportation was provided; and Greyhound and the airport were shut down. I know nothing about public transportation in New Orleans; I do know that in my city, public transportation will get you at most 15 or 20 miles from downtown. There are a few bus routes which go further out; they run one bus into the city during morning rush hour and one bus out during evening rush hour, and those go to rural areas. I’ve lived through a category 5 hurricane in Hawaii. Twenty miles is not far enough to go to be out of the danger zone.
In my opinion, one of the most egregious and offensive failures of the whole Katrina mess was ordering people to evacuate and not giving the means to do so or a place to go to.
How far could you travel without a car in an emergency, Magiver?
Huh? Are you asserting that the poor would have stayed in the city even if they had access to transportation?
Why is it another discussion?
It’s my understanding that many of the most despicable acts of violence (eg, the rapes and murders) occured INSIDE the shelter provided by the city. And remember that in that shelter, there was no food, water, or operational sanitation facilities for many, many days. How is that a more rational choice than taking your chances on the streets?
Like Siege said, how would you have gotten out without a car, Magiver?
If people are sheep, then they would have obeyed evacuations orders and used the means provided by state local and federal government to get out. Therefore if people are sheep, the evacuation was carried out incompetently. So either people are sheep or the evacuation was inept. You can’t have it both ways.
Note that the proposition people are not sheep and the evacuation was inept does make logical sense.
Just FTR, I’m not unsympathetic to a lot of libertarian thought, both social and economic. But this sort of disaster is one of the things you have a government for. And Amber Pawlik style objectivists freak me out. Ayn Rand wrote fiction, for crying out loud! Her books are no more applicable to the real world than Batman comics.
I have no doubt that even had there been a successful evac some people would have been stubborn and foolish enough to refuse to leave. But this truism should not be used to explain the many people who wanted to leave NO but couldn’t.
The fact that people didn’t leave is a sign we are sheep. People aren’t going to do somethign radical at the drop of a hat like leave behind everything they own and know. They stayed behind because we are social creatures and base our identity on consistency.
To me it is people who always conform to their surroundings, authority figures only have authority if the surroundings give it to them. Nobody in the US cares what a policeman in North Korea tells us to do.
In an emergency the transportation is provided for by the city.
There were school and metro buses available, many of them now underwater. The Mayor had the means and authority to use them in an emergency (which he declared). It was part of states emergency plan to utilize them.
The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in
evacuating.
My original point about the Mayor.
Normally I would stand outside cursing at the world until someone helped me but in New Orleans that’s the Mayor’s job. Hiding is out of the question because that’s the Governor’s job.
Despite the fact that it is was the responsibility of the City of New Orleans to transport the needy out of harms way I would have located an acquaintance with a car. The notification to leave the city was on Friday so that would give me 2 days to explain to someone that a level 5 hurricane is basically a tornado the size of Idaho. You can respond with a bunch of “what ifs” but you’re not going to convince me I wouldn’t know someone with a car. The flood pictures tell the story. The city is now a sea of submerged vehicles.
Yes, absolutely. That is exactly what many of them did. In fact, that is why so many people drowned. The levee breach overwhelmed them and that specific danger was known to virtually everyone on a planning level. As I type this, the Mayor is ordering them to leave and will forcibly remove those who refuse.
You’re understanding is limited to the Superdome. It was one of 10 shelters provided. The coliseum was stocked with provisions and well policed but you never heard that on the news (unless you watch PBS).
Yes, we’ve seen the pictures of those buses - still in their parking yards. Was the plan for people to hike to the City bus depot and drive the buses out themselves?
Do you in fact have evidence that the city provided these buses en masse to those who needed them? Don’t tell us what the plan said. Show us the plan was implemented.
Fact: An estimated 100,000 were left in New Orleans after the hurricane. Greyhound, the Airlines, and Amtrak stopped serving the city the day before the storm. Most of those left in New Orleans were poor, some were tourist that couldn’t find a way out. Some of the major hotels chartered buses to get their guests out of town. But a lot were stuck in New Orleans.
Fact: The buses in the parking lot photogragh numbered 205. Even with other buses in the city, the best estimate would require the city to have each bus make 5 trips.
Fact: Human nature concludes that you will have to force people onto the first bus trip and force people off the last bus trip. Most people wouldn’t leave until the last minute.
Fact: The ratio of people in need of transportation to city employees was still 20 to 1. As we can assume that half of the city employees would be need to help those that can get out on the own, the ratio is now 40 to 1.
Fact: As everything in Louisiana, Mississippi and eastern Texas is effected by the same storm you would need to transport this people to transport these people 3 to 5 hours away to be reasonably safe. This would be well out of the jurisdiction of any New Orleans mayor. Because of the distance involved (along with increasing traffic) you would need to start busing these people out 48 hours before the storm hit. And that is not counting the fact that you wouldn’t want any buses still on the road when the storm hit.
Fact: No city in America has a distant relief center to house 100,000 people. Even Holiday Inn doesn’t have 100,000 nationwide. I’m sure that New Orleans could have rented every room in Las Vegas, but short of that, where would these people go?
Question: While New Orleans did have a problem with possible flooding, does Los Angeles have a plan for their city because of earthquakes, New York City for terrorist attacks against several skyscrapers, Miami for a their own hurricanes, Hawaii for Typhons, or Southern California for the possible break in Hoover Dam?
I live in a town of 25,000 in Alabama. All city employees, including librarians and garbage men only make 200 people. While we are too far north to really worry about hurricanes, tornadoes are a big problem. Even if we knew ahead of time about a tornado, the city employees are too few in number to handle a major storm. We would need the help of the state, and if the storm was so big that the state was effected we would need help from either other states or THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. My opinion would be to get people to the nearest safe area and if something bad does happen, hope that my fellow Americans would come help us.
That would our version of an Astrodome or Cenvention Center.
What I was asking for a cite for was your assertion that transportation was made available to those who didn’t have it. While there may have been a plan to use it, the harsh reality is it wasn’t. Congratulations, sir. You’ve managed to contradict yourself.
Please supply a picture of 250 bus drivers, now underwater. You can’t drive busses without bus drivers, most of whom were probably busy evacuatiing their own families. Just because you can point at some submerged busses does not mean they were availble as a means of evacuation.
Lord knows I don’t want to agree with MaGiver but if the city had a plan to use the buses doesn’t it make sense that they would have a plan to provide drivers? The point is the city dropped the ball.
Cite? There was looting, and some localized disruptions, but you make it sound like South Central was going on. There was nothing that a National Guard presence couldn’t have quickly handled. Unless the rioting problem that stalled the rescue efforts was inside the White House.
It’s amazing how the Republican mantra of blame the victim has gently slid into the realm of flat out accusing them.
What notification are you speaking of? The official evacuation order was actually given Sunday morning. In fact, if you look back at the National Hurricane Center’s Katrina archive, the track forecast didn’t even predict the hurricane to go near New Orleans until 11pm EDT Friday night…and the NHS itself would tell you that such track forecasts that far in advance can have errors of several hundred miles (although in this case, their forecast track from late Friday evening on was pretty much dead on).
Furthermore, Katrina did not become a Category 5 hurricane until Sunday morning…in fact, it didn’t even attain Category 4 status until 1am CDT Sunday morning. At 11pm EDT Friday night, it was a Category 2 storm although they were forecasting it to become a “major hurricane” (meaning Category 3 or higher).
The hurricane watch was first issued for New Orleans at 1pm CDT on Saturday and upgraded to a warning at 10pm CDT Saturday night.
As for the general attempt to blame this or various problems on the welfare state, the basic problem one faces with such a thesis is that it flies in the face of facts. As another poster above noted, the various problems that are generally blamed on the welfare state are problems that exist to a much larger degree in the U.S. than in any (or almost any) other First World country with a less bare-bones welfare state. The only way that people can ever successfully make these arguments is by pretending that the rest of the world simply does not exist and that the only place that we have to get any data on the issue is in U.S. alone.