2seaoat, who simply wants something to do, posts...misinformation about Hurricane Katrina.
Once again, 2seaoats version of what happened...and what happened...are two very different things.
City had evacuation plan but strayed from strategy
By LISE OLSEN
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
Cancer patient Earl Robicheaux, his immune system depleted by radical chemotherapy, lay in a hospital bed as Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans.
Trying to leave, he thought, seemed suicidal.
But after four days in the hospital's reeking darkness, he escaped via a Black Hawk helicopter that landed on the roof of the University Hospital under heavy guard because of the threat of sniper fire.
It was not the evacuation plan authorities had envisioned for its sick, its elderly and its poor. As the floodwaters recede, serious questions remain about whether New Orleans and Louisiana officials followed their own plans for evacuating people with no other way out.
The mayor's mandatory evacuation order was issued 20 hours before the storm struck the Louisiana coast, less than half the time researchers determined would be needed to get everyone out.
City officials had 550 municipal buses and hundreds of additional school buses at their disposal but made no plans to use them to get people out of New Orleans before the storm, said Chester Wilmot, a civil engineering professor at Louisiana State University and an expert in transportation planning, who helped the city put together its evacuation plan.
Instead, local buses were used to ferry people from 12 pickup points to poorly supplied "shelters of last resort" in the city. An estimated 50,000 New Orleans households have no access to cars, Wilmot said.
State and local plans both called for extra help to be provided in advance to residents with "special needs," though no specific timetable was prepared. But phone lines for people who needed specialized shelters opened at noon Saturday — barely 30 hours before Katrina came ashore in Louisiana.
Many people from New Orleans ended up staying home or using a "last resort" special needs shelter state authorities and the city health department set up at the Superdome. Those who made it out of town initially found limited space. The state of Louisiana provided shelter in Baton Rouge and five other cities for a total of about 1,000.
In the city of New Orleans alone, more than 100,000 of the city's residents described themselves as disabled in a recent U.S. census.
Early mistakes
Hospitals were exempted from the mayor's mandatory evacuation order. But at least two public hospitals, loaded with more than 1,000 caregivers and patients, had their generators in their basements, which made them vulnerable in a flood. That violated the state's hurricane plan but had gone uncorrected for years because the hospitals did not have the money to fix the situation, a state university hospital official told the Chronicle.
The consequences came to bear in the images hours and days later: Elderly people dying outside shelters and hospitals that were losing power and, finally, their patients. Now, hurricane evacuation experts around the country are asking why New Orleans failed to prepare for the flood scenario from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane.
"Everybody knew about it. There's no excuse for not having a plan," said Jay Baker, a Florida State University associate professor who is an expert in hurricane evacuations and is familiar with New Orleans hurricane studies.
Tami Frazier, a spokeswoman for Mayor C. Ray Nagin, currently working out of Houston, refused to comment on direct questions this week or to answer several written questions sent via e-mail. She cited the need to focus on rescuing citizens and recovering bodies.
Robicheaux, the cancer patient who was trapped in a downtown New Orleans hospital, said he thought the city "decided basically to let it ride."
"When you're in a city like New York and there's a big snowstorm, you expect them to have plows. That's not the way it is here. There are no resources to stockpile supplies."
Saturday evening, Hurricane Katrina had intensified to Category 4, with the possibility that it could strike land as a killer Category 5 storm.
About 8 p.m., Mayor Nagin fielded an unusual personal call at home from Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, who wanted to be sure Nagin knew what was coming.
Still, Nagin waited to issue a mandatory evacuation, apparently because of legal complications, said Frazier. She said the city attorney was unavailable for an interview to explain.
But Kris Wartelle, spokeswoman for the attorney general of Louisiana, said state law clearly gives the mayor the authority to "direct and compel the evacuation of all or part of the population from any stricken or threatened area."
"They're not confused about it. He had the authority to do it," Wartelle said.
The mandatory evacuation order came at 10 a.m Sunday.
Former Kemah Mayor Bill King, who has spent years trying to boost funding and organization for hurricanes planning in the Houston-Galveston area, said Nagin's decision to wait to order people out compounded the tragedy.
"To call an evacuation on Sunday morning when the storm was going to hit on Monday morning at 6 a.m. is just ... negligence," King said. "If he'd called it better than that he would have saved lives."
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/hurricanes/article/New-Orleans-strayed-from-evacuation-plan-1491205.php
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