After the Katrina disaster will people still be allowed to stay in their houses in danger areas in the future? What else (if anything) might change in the way these things are prepared for and handled?
Any thoughts?
IIRC, there was a mandatory evacuation order in effect for NO.
I think that the next time this sort of thing occurs, there will be immediate orders to shoot looters on sight. We will also see that the emergency services will be much better prepared: lessons will be learned.
I hope you are kidding.
This is america. We dont shoot thieves. What if they are steeling water and food and diapers and floatation devices? Even a theft of a plasma screen tv doent warrant the death penalty.
Lessons learned. HA! We apparently havent learned shit. We set up the whole Department of Homeland Security to repond to disaters aftrer 9/11. We supposedly learned our lesson then on emergency responce. In fact I think a mobil McDonalds was already set up by this time in NYC. We are worse at it now than before.
It is not the fault of the survivors in the streets. Athority and civil disorder is not being defied because it does not exist.
Well, I would hope that we’ve learned it’s better to provide free evacuation services to those unable to evacuate themselves than to wait until after the disaster strikes.
I know there are many people who chose not to evacuate, but many had no car and little money and no place to go.
I completely agree. If buses had been sent in to those transport people who lacked cars or the money for plane tickets out of the danger zones, there wouldn’t be quite so many people there now who are dead, stuck and dying, or homeless.
I just wonder if anyone will “get it” now.
I agree. Like I said in another Katrina thread…
People who could have left should have. They only have themselves to blame. BUT New Orleans has a ton of really poor people. No cars, no money, no way to get out and nowhere to go. What could they have done? And of course the sick, elderly and infirm. They should have had busses going through the poorer neighborhods, picking up people for free and talking them to shelters. Why wasn’t this done? And where could anyone expect these people to go and stay for weeks or months with no transportation or money? Massive refugee camps should have been set up ahead of time.
I’m really angry about this whole thing. I hate to say it BUT does anyone think this would be happening if this occurred in a wealthier white city? Look at the pictures and footage - 95% of the stranded victims are black.
Oh, and shoot looters on sight? Many were looting for survival - to get food and water. Since the authorities weren’t providing it, what else could they do?
I have to wonder how much of this comes down to finances: sure, in this case, it would have made more financial sense to bus everyone out and house and feed them before all this water and debris and looters made it harder.
But what about the 10 hurricanes this year that didn’t result in lots of damage to at least some of the area they were predicted to strike? How do we know when it’s going to be kinda bad and when it’s going to be really bad? How do we no exactly where it’s going to be really bad? Can we afford to evacuate 1 million people 25 or more times a year? Can we get them onto busses 25 times, even if we can find the money to do it?
Yes, some people may have wanted to evacuate and couldn’t afford it. (I expect, human nature being what it is, that more people will now say they wanted to evacuate than actually wanted to evacuate at the time - hindsight being 20/20 and all.) But there are always thousands of people who don’t WANT to evacuate, whether they can afford it or not. Some because they’re afraid of looters taking all their stuff, some because they can’t bear to leave their ancestral home, and some simply who have heard thousands of storm warnings and evacuation orders in their long lives, and have no way of knowing that this one will be the big one.
Moving people against their will brings up all sorts of unlawful restraint issues I don’t think we’re ready to deal with, even in a “mandatory” evacuation scenario. At some point, we have to accept that people make their own choices. Making busses available makes sense, but herding people onto them at gunpoint (which is what it would take to get my granny to go!) might be a public relations and legal nightmare.
Walked.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency and ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city. He exempted essential federal, state, and local personnel; emergency and utility workers; transit workers; media; hotel workers; and patrons from the evacuation order.
The wisest person in the world only had less than 48 hours between would have Bush’s state of Emergency to landfall and less than 24 hours from the time of the Evacuation order to being hit. I’m just saying that this needs to be a factor in this discussion.
Lets do a timeline: 8/27 Katrina is across Florida and in the Gulf and strengthens to a Category 2. Bush declares a State of Emergency in LA and MS, 8/28 after it has strengthened to Category 5 New Orleans Mayor orders the Mandatory Evacuation 8/28 10AM CDT, Katrina makes landfall in LA at 6:10 AM CDT on the 29th. So let’s be clear here it is not like these folks ignored weeks and weeks of warnings…
As an example This Dude was blogging from New Orleans. He stayed too late, no power so no word but I hope he is OK.
FEMA and other relief agencies planned on the normal hurricane response. Afterall, in recent years, they have gotten pretty good at coming to the rescue after a hurricane. But what happened to NO is different. The actual disaster happened after the hurricane and was not predicted. No one seriously contemplated what would happend should the levee system fail. Most hurricanes have a few people killed and lots of property damage which is fairly ( by comparison ) easy to clean up. But NO is now an uninhabitable sewage and toxic waste dump. EVERYONE in the entire region is now homeless with no chance of returning for months if not years. How are you supposed to help hundreds of thousands of people when you can’t even get to them? It takes time to load and mobilize supplies for that many people when you basically have to start from zero.
I think the national agencied involved could have done a better job. but given the unpredicted scope of the disaster, they are doing an admirable job of ramping up.
Yeah, walking around, possibly with children in tow, in what could well be 100 mph winds would be a great idea. I hope this was merely a thoughtless rather than a heartless remark.
How sure are you that these people walk to safety with the warning that they had? Would you just start walking with no where to go and little or no money? Think about it. Don’t you think you might feel safer in a building. You’ve never seen the levees break before. You’ve lived through lots of hurricane warnings. You may well never have been very far outside of New Orleans.
And while the looting has been a shock to us, it’s probably been less of a shock to the people that lived in the neighborhoods where most of the people without transportation lived. They were all thinking if they left what they left behind might well be gone whether it was a false alarm or not.
Umm… they were given plenty of warning. A day or more before the winds hit. And a family can easily cover 10 miles in a day, if not more. Getting out of range would have been hard; getting to shelter on high ground is a different matter.
These should have been on the road full of evacuees Saturday night. Note the caption well.
This was going to be my point, as well. I see I’m only about 16 hours late, is all!
Really, all talk about how “mandatory” evacuations should be doesn’t really address the issue in NO. The fact is, when the order came down, almost all transportation – air, bus, and rail – had long since SHUT DOWN. There was no way to evacuate.
Agreed.
So, should we ask…why weren’t they?
School buses would be driven by school bus drivers, and my WAG would be the school bus drivers weren’t trained into the city’s disaster evacuation plan.
What about the elderly? The disabled? People who need oxygen generators? Single parents with small children/infants? Who
Sure. The next potential disaster will be planned and organized like crazy, with contingencies for all worst-case eventualities.
And then after three or four events that aren’t as bad as people fear, the lessons will be forgotten.