Katrina preparedness

From PhiloWiki

Was New Orleans prepared?

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• Gone with the Water - Joel K Bourne, Jr, National Geographic (written in 2004)

"It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party."

• Why Didn't Nagin Follow His Own Plan? - Captain Ed, Captain's Quarters

"Mark Tapscott, one of the best crossover bloggers and a fierce researcher, turned up an interesting document yesterday: the New Orleans comprehensive hurricane disaster plan. The plan exists on line and has a high level of detail, and yet the Exempt Media has given no coverage of its contents. The most obvious reason is that it shows that New Orleans and the state of Louisiana didn't follow their own plan."

• The Evacuation Plan Mayor Nagin Failed to Implement - Rush Limbaugh

"Folks, I'm sorry. I would have led off the program with this. I have been under a terrible misconception. I thought by now everybody would have known that there was a documented, detailed evacuation plan for the city of New Orleans that was not implemented at all. But I'm reading my e-mail, "Well, I never heard of this." Now, I didn't get a chance to spend the whole weekend watching television, but I would have thought certainly by now the mainstream press would have uncovered this. It's been all over the place. Snerdley didn't even know about it. I'm terribly sorry about this. Let me start there. I'm holding in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers -- this is Annex One Hurricanes Preparedness, City of New Orleans; Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan; Part two, Evacuation. This thing is huge. It's typical of something a bureaucracy would produce. No wonder nobody read it. Nobody probably can."