southchild

My good buddy, HR, chimed in on the fiasco in New Orleans:

The New Orleans / state of Louisiana plan was a perfect example of Democrat/liberal
thinking. If there is no easy answer for a hard local problem, no matter how
critical, just kick the can down the road, cross your fingers and hope the Feds can
work miracles on short notice if the worst case unfolds. If the Feds don’t come
through to perfection, then hope that it’s a Republican administration that is
unfortunate enough to have to save your butt so you call them cruelly uncaring
and/or racist for not being able to fix the mess in days that could have been
prevented if you had taken responsible action years ago. Sounds just like the
Clinton administration policy on Islamic terrorism.

Amen!

HR submits Ghost Plan for a Ghost Town as documentation of the failure of local and state emergency evacuation plans and implementations. It’s not a pretty picture:

But it turns out that emergency-preparedness officials in New Orleans did have a plan, and they did think to use buses to evacuate the city before a major hurricane. They just decided not to fully implement it as Plan A. The plan was developed as a hurricane Georges lesson learned. This appeared in an article that appeared in November 2004 in the Natural Hazards Observer:

Residents who did not have personal transportation were unable to evacuate even if they wanted to. Approximately 120,000 residents (51,000 housing units x 2.4 persons/unit) do not have cars. A proposal made after the evacuation for Hurricane Georges to use public transit buses to assist in their evacuation out of the city was not implemented for Ivan. If Ivan had struck New Orleans directly it is estimated that 40-60,000 residents of the area would have perished.

So the question after dodging the Georges bullet seemed to be, “Do we figure out a way to use buses or do we allow 50,000 people to die for the crime of not having a car?” They chose Plan B.

Hurricanes come in cycles of frequency and activity. Meteorologists don’t really know why, other than that it might have something to do with solar activity and shifting deep sea currents (but responsible scientists do know the hurricane cycle has nothing to do with humans burning fossil fuels). We are currently at the cusp of an intensification of hurricanes. We can expect more of them, and we can expect more of them to be strong.

As the hurricane cycle kept building in the last decade or so, there were increasing calls to create a real evacuation plan. Many of those who pleaded for the use of buses will come forward soon, but for everyone who does, there are others who do not have the strength to come forward. They can’t hack their way out of their attics right now to tell us their side of it. And the journalists at the New Orleans Times-Picayune are no longer interested in speaking on their behalf. As their “Open Letter to the President” shows, they’re now the spokesmen for other political interests. It didn’t used to be that way until the inevitable happened. Now they have circled the wagons to protect the guilty and accuse the innocent.

Read the story. There’s much more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2005 at 12:11 am and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.