Same problem with Tidewater VA … Va Beach, Suffolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeak and Newport News. Look at a map. The 5 cities are sprawled around the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. We have a mongo long bridge, Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, all 26 miles of it. Then there are bridges across various rivers, tunnels under various rivers. Rt 64 cuts through it as pretty much the only major interstate. i remember evacuating in 85 when Gloria ran up the coast. I got stuck at work until about 1 when my BF of the time told off the owner of my company and walked me out of the office and locked the doors behind me. We drove to his moms up in Dillwyn VA [she lives in a farm right next to the slammer] by heading down 64 towards South Carolina, through Chesapeake until we could swing around and head up towards Charlottesville. The road was packed solid and police had opened up both sides to evacuate upon.
Superfluous Parentheses, in my opinion, someone as lacking in both basic knowledge and any sense of human empathy as the OP is probably not worth responding to.
“You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna know”
[Moderator Warning]
This is not permitted in GQ. If you wish to make a personal attack on another poster, you must take it to the Pit.
[/Moderator Warning]
[NOT Moderating]
Speaking for myself, not as a moderator, you’re not going to make many friends here with that kind of attitude. Especially since, with an audience this size, there are almost sure to be people from New Orleans on here.
I merely wanted to express my digust with the poster’s ideas in a concise manner. I will try to hide this digust in a more long-winded but less technically abusive and more confusing way if that’s what the rules stipulate.
Not to mention there’s nothing stopping the local authorities from simply comandeering all of your vechicles to assist in their evacuation effort. It’s perfectly legal in a crisis. Then what are you going to do? You really want your drivers and hired guns to go resist the police & National Guard? That would cost a shitload of money; both to pay them enought to do that in the first place and the massive amount of money you’re going to neet to spend on lawyers to keep your ass out of jail afterwards.
If what’s his name would just try to cross the Howard Franklin bridge during rush hour to or from Tampa, he could have some small idea of the difficulty of moving traffic on a normal day. I see no reason why New Orleans wouldn’t have traffic jams as a matter of course; we’re dealing with a guy who hasn’t a modicum of good sense. Bless his heart.
ok, so we have established that:
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offering any sort of rescue services for money in disaster zones, especially those having to do with transportation, is very risky due to the threat of lawsuits, commandeering of private property by authorities and other forms of government persecution
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limitations of the road system in the vicinity of New Orleans made transportation for evacuation very difficult at the time immediately preceding and during the hurricane
Ignorance fought decisively, thanks a lot everybody.
You forgot about it being very hard to make any profit even if either of those situations (but especially situation1) weren’t the case.
Yeah, it sucks to be a corporation, don’t it? The Man is always breathin down your frickin neck and hasslin ya, when all you want is to be a upstanding citizen, and maybe make a few dollars here and there. 
I would hope you had a cite for this kind of accusation.
Some for profits did make money off evacuation during Katrina http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/scahill
madmonk28,
interesting info, but this sounds simply like a part of the overall government imposed martial law. In some places government did martial law with National Guard and maybe in others with these mercenaries. It’s not clear if they did any evacuation or rescue work. Maybe it was just a nice way for the powers that be to funnel government money to business associates in the private sector 
I remember reading that some of the high end hotels hired Blackwater mercenaries to evac their patrons.
Don’t assume it has to be like that. It’s partly a function of planning and practice - here in South Carolina, they can get the evacuation routes running all lanes west before you can say “storm surge”, because we didn’t see the hurricane finally coming and go, “hey, you know what? Maybe we should have had a plan for that! Steve, you get right on that!” Of course, evacuation plans here have to contend with the fact that something really bad or unpredictable could have, say, Florida and Georgia getting west here too. (Floyd did that - evacuations all up and down the coast and the nightmare scenario of evacuating Savannah, so we had more than our share of traffic.) We’re not perfect, but you would never have the kind of fuckup they had with Rita (? I think?) here. We do drills.
Granted, New Orleans has a much bigger geographical problem - I just wanted to point out that just because evacuations in some places were really bad doesn’t mean they have to be or that it’s necessarily a problem with the landscape.
If some entrepreneur out there sees an opportunity in for-profit hurricane evacuation, I see no reason to discourage it. However, similar to mail delivery, there are probably large parts of the country where it is not going to be profitable. Once you factor in the realities of a for-profit business, like predicting where the market is going to be, staffing the operation, and collections, the profitable market is probably not that big. There may be a market for a Fed Ex or UPS of hurricane evacuation, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need a postal service for those who can’t afford a huge markup over the regular travel cost.
Once you start spreading that markup over more time and people, it turns into insurance (if you keep it in the private sector) or taxes (if you turn it over to government), which just really doesn’t make much of a difference, IMHO. The Red Cross is probably the biggest non-profit in this sector, and their model seems to be more focused on going in to help people on site rather than evacuating people. Presumably they find their money goes farther that way than it does in trying to maintain fleets of buses at the ready.
What I don’t understand is why the local officials; mayor, governor, etc. didn’t involve local churches in educating their congregants, organizing and co-ordinating busses to move people a few days before. I know I saw a parking lot full of flooded buses that could have been used to move people
And the Dope advances civilization on multiple fronts once again! (Watch my Fabious hair and SD cape flowing in the wind…in slow motion, of course.)
On a more serious note, there has been at least one case of entrepreneurs getting involved in a similar (albeit a far less logistically complex rescue situation). I vaguely remember watching a History Channel (I believe) show in which the northern US was socked by the mother of all snow storms. A bunch of people were trapped in stalled elevated trains. Local individuals with ladders freed those individuals for fifty cents each.
I remember thinking to myself (and quite smugly for those that fondly recount "the good old days’), that that crap wouldn’t happen nowadays.
Today, local volunteers would have saved the stranded commuters at no cost.
So…while I would have preferred to tell said entrepreneurs to FU in a long-winded but less technically abusive and more confusing way, I myself, would have gladly paid the 50 cents, tipped the ladder-master and, assuming I had enough cash, would have paid the way for as many orphans and little old ladies as possible (again, with Fabio-like hair blowing in the white out conditions).
Of course, there weren’t as many lawyers back then.
I don’t think that’s accurate. I’m pretty sure that Bush wanted to send in the National Guard from other states to help out and it was the governor of Louisiana that initially balked.
Much was made about those buses, but using them wasn’t so simple. Somebody has to drive them, and I think it takes a commercial license to do that. You can’t really order a civilian school bus driver to abandon his home/family to go save other people. Somebody has to pay for the gas. And you can’t just pack people onto buses. They have to have somewhere to go. The people on them have to eat, shit, sleep, etc. Many of them can’t afford to pay for food/lodging for any extended period of time even if there was somewhere for them to go. Plus you still have the road situation detailed above.