I understand how heartbreaking it would be to leave your pets, but there are plenty of people who have allergic reactions to cats and dogs that include asthma attacks. I have had asthma attacks from cats so bad that the emergency room doctor told me that I was lucky to be alive. Because of this, I don’t think that shelters should take in pets, but I not be opposed to a few of the evacuation busses set aside for those with pets.
I cannot imagine a good reason for the busses laying idle in the city. At the very least, they should have loaded up the city busses and took people out of the city. They knew how devastating this could be, if not from anything else but the newspaper report two years ago. They thought it likely enough that Katrina would hit or they would not have evacuated.
Now the president’s press secretary is saying that people should not take food and bottled water that is there, but wait until the government manages to get food to people. The national guard prevented, with threats of "blowing their heads off, people seeking shelter in the convention center from accessing the kitchens. The account of that comes from a business owner sheltered there. So, yes, some think even finders should be shot.
I haven’t seen any actual figures, so have no way of knowning for sure, but it certainly seems to be the poor and the elderly who stayed behind (by and large). They couldn’t afford to get out (no transportation, no money for fares), not to mention that they certainly couldn’t afford to stay anywhere else if they even managed to get out of town.
I’d run to the store a few times on Saturday and stocked up on non-perishable food and filled containers with water, so I would’ve been all right for a while. Also, I live in the third floor of an apartment building in the Garden District, which is on slightly higher ground than most of the city, so that’s why the guys working at my building suggested that I stay. Bear in mind that I’d lived in New Orleans for four days and didn’t have a clue where to go or what to do.
Looking back, I should’ve left on Saturday, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that. I’m just glad I’m OK.
A lot of the poor may have run into the problem that they couldn’t afford to stock up on food and water. Poor people often don’t have surplus cash-- as soon as they get it, they have to use it to meet other expenses.
Actually I’m not going to fault your logic for staying based on the fact that you actually did some planning. You were in a building above flood stage that would withstand a hurricane and you stocked food and water in the event you were stranded. You were prepared for a hurricane but not the potential disaster of a levee breech. You also made the decision to leave, which means you assessed the situation correctly and acted on it. I’d be proud of your actions if you were a kid of mine.
For reasons that we won’t know for some time (if ever), a significant number of people didn’t exercise the common sense you exhibited.
I’m glad you’re OK too. Since I berated you unfairly I’ll give you the benefit of a confession of my early days in college.
Years ago I was discussing extreme weather conditions with my boss who use to work in the field of meteorology. I was so enthralled with his stories I decided to watch an approaching storm from a rail yard some distance from my house. It was a violent storm on radar and I could clearly see bright green lightening in the distance (it’s caused by refraction through hail). It was a world class, 60 mph gully washer with the most number of lighting strikes I’ve ever seen from one storm. And I’m standing outside watching it. It struck so fast I only had time to crawl under a coal car and stand up in the peaked section of it. Even with the train blocking me I was soaked up to my hair and froze my ass off for an hour while trying not to touch anything metal.
And this is yet another reason why many poor people may not have bought a bus ticket before service stopped. Welfare checks, Social Security checks, and most paychecks are issued on the first of the month. By sheer bad luck, the hurricane hit at the end of the month. A lot of poor people simply wouldn’t have the funds at the end of a month to purchase a bus ticket, even if they wanted to leave.
Havn’t you read the thread? For a signifigant number of people, there was no way out. The only way to evacuate was via private vehicle, and the only shelters out of the city were hotels and private arrangments.
No, that’s not correct. The Mayor ordered an evacuation and then provided transportation to 10 local shelters set up by the city. There are 3 flaws with that plan: it implies that people don’t have to leave the city to survive. It implies there will be support at the shelters. And the biggest flaw of them all is that it locks them into a city that is threatened by a category 4 hurricane.
If you listened to the Mayor’s original announcement he had no urgency in his voice. I thought it was odd at the time because I (a resident of Ohio) knew the levees were not designed for anything beyond a level 3 hurricane. The city is BELOW SEA LEVEL. I’ve been studying satellite photo’s and I don’t see flood gates on all the canals so there’s nothing stopping Lake Pontchartrain from filling the city. Even if the levees held, the hurricane would have wiped the city out if it had hit straight on. By default, a proper emergency plan is designed to accommodate worst case scenarios.
As far as I can tell, he didn’t anticipate the volume of people and ran out of supplies or there were no supplies at all. Either way he screwed the pooch on the concept of emergency shelters. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out the Superdome was an afterthought. I have to believe the other 9 shelters had food and water.
The pinnacle of bad planning was to pick up the people in need and NOT remove them from the city. This is the exact opposite of what the Mayor himself is telling people to do, LEAVE THE CITY. He had all the assets necessary with metro and school busses. If he had followed his own advice, the school buses wouldn’t be under water and the citizens of New Orleans would in shelters that are accessible to outside help. There are privately collected supplies driving to New Orleans from every corner of the country. FEMA isn’t even needed for this stage of support.
The crisis here is not the hurricane, it’s the levees. There were 10,000 National Guard members deployed along the path of the hurricane on Friday (2 days before it hit). New Orleans was not the center of the storm nor should it have been the center of rescue. The Guards were there for general support across the entire region of which Mississippi was the area most affected. What they were not there for, specifically, was military suppression of thousands of hoodlums. Days were lost (not hours) trying to stop the chaos. Considering New Orleans is one of the most violent cities in the US, it should have been anticipated on a local level. The Mayor had to work with the Governor in order to make that happen. The Federal Government CANNOT ride into town and start shooting people. They absolutely must be invited. I watched the Mayor on TV Sunday saying he didn’t understand why the Federal Government didn’t just break the rules and “do something”. Had he taken his own advice he could have used unskilled volunteers to drive the city-owned buses to points of safety carrying the same people he transported to the Superdome.
Magiver, if you’re going to take people out of the city, you must have a place to put them, right? It would require coordination with other cities, something more planned than what happened.
I think something like this should be done, but it needed to be thought and planned and done beforehand, at the start of the hurricane season, not when the hurricane was already there (or here, for me).
So… those thousands of people that where at the Superdome, where do you put them? Heck, Baton Rouge refuge centers are full, and not all of them came from the Superdome. Many of my classmates have relatives living with them, those were not evacuated from the Superdome either.
, You move the people out of harms way first. There were first response teams in place starting on Friday. The team from my home town arrived Monday before the storm and have already returned from their mission.
Where do you put them??? The same places they’re at now. Every city in the country stands ready to help.
The National Guard was deployed throughout the region as well as the supplies. If the people were located away from the city and there weren’t riots the relief would have connected the people who needed it.
As for the people who stayed behind, they get what they get when they get it. I’ve watched hours of people getting interviewed on streets filled with cars. Even now they don’t want to leave their houses for fear of looting.
I’m not sure the Superdome was that good an idea. Even though the hurricane missed the city, the roof was still coming apart. What if a cat 5 storm had hit it? Would it have held?
That said, the Superdome was certainly not an afterthought. I believe it’s been part of the New Orleans disaster plan for a long time.
Magiver, no. The evacuation have not been as organized as it should be (considering it was an afterthought, I don’t blame it), and some families have been separated (temporarily) because different busses and helicopters lead you to different cities.
Saying “Get them out of there first!” without a thought of where will they go has as much planification as “Go to the convention center!” and then forgetting to stock up that center with supplies. If they were going to evacuate the city, they must have a had a plan from the beginning of the season, and some coordination with other Louisiana cities (and neighboring states, even).
And while the cities are ready to help NOW, I don’t know if many of them would have been ready to help on Saturday and Sunday, when they were needed. Would they be fully stocked with supplies and food, water, first aid kits?
And Monday (last week) was not before the storm. The worst of the storm passed Monday morning.
And finally, you saw cars on the street, but were people being interviewed riding them? Perhaps they were other people’s cars, people who got out or went to the convention center.
What sucks most of all is that the people that are still there are not some abstract concept that we can tidily chastise, but are instead real people who stayed behind, were left behind, were trapped behind, were required to stay behind by their employer, etc., and many are still to this day not out of danger, more than a week after the storm hit.
I just saw a note from a colleague (I don’t know him personally) in New Orleans. He evacuated his family to Baton Rouge, but stayed behind to ride it out. He didn’t give his reasons, and I’m not going to ask, at least right now. I’d venture a guess to stay behind and look after their property in the aftermath. His home is 8 blocks from where the levee broke. They got about 8’ of water, but he was able to take his boat out and assist in rescue operations, putting in up to 18 hours a day. He began to rescue people and animals that were stranded. The third person he rescued was a stranded New Orleans police officer. He estimates that in five days they rescued several hundred people, but then as the looting and gunfire grew worse he evacuated out of the area to family. One of these was an eleven year old girl who was pulled from her attic. He estimated that it was about 140 degrees inside. The only other person in there with her dead mother. Her father had passed away a few years prior, so she is now orphaned by the storm.
Net, probably a bit foolish to stay behind, but he was able to make a positive difference in the aftermath. Ideally, everyone would have been out of there, but realistically this is never going to happen. Even the next time a hurricane strikes somewhere, there will be people left behind, willingly or unwillingly riding the storm out.