Been There, Done That…

Badly.

Residents with cars took to the highways. Others wondered what to do.
“They say evacuate, but they don’t say how I’m supposed to do that,” Latonya Hill, 57, said at the time. “If I can’t walk it or get there on the bus, I don’t go. I don’t got a car. My daughter don’t either.”
Advocates for the poor were indignant.
“If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can’t evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature,” said Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU…
…Mayor Ray Nagin’s spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the Superdome, but said the evacuation was the top priority.
“Our main focus is to get the people out of the city,” she said.
Callers to talk radio complained about the late decision to open up the dome, but the mayor said he would do nothing different.
“We did the compassionate thing by opening the shelter,” Nagin said. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t have a repeat performance of what happened before. We didn’t want to see people cooped up in the Superdome for days.”…
…Col. Henry Whitehorn, head of state police, said he believes his agency acted appropriately, but also acknowledged he never expected a seven-hour-long crawl for the 60 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
It was so bad that some broadcasters were telling people to stay home, that they had missed their window of opportunity to leave. They claimed the interstates had turned into parking lots where trapped people could die in a storm surge…
…Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged the need to improve traffic flow and said state police should consider reversing highway lanes earlier. They also promised meetings with governments in neighboring localities and state transportation officials to improve evacuation plans.
But Blanco and other state officials stressed that, while irritating, the clogged escape routes got people out of the most vulnerable areas.
“We were able to get people out,” state Commissioner of Administration Jerry Luke LeBlanc said. “It was successful. There was frustration, yes. But we got people out of harm’s way.”

Sound familiar, n’est pas? But the storm was Ivan and this report was filed last year. Check out their self congratulatory ‘it was successful’. They’ve been living in LA-La-Lay-the-Blame Land for quite a while and pretty much have the act down pat. The New Orleans disaster plan seems to have been a sham document, compiled only to comply with Federal requirements for funding. It certainly wasn’t a working document, as I understand them. A pretty point paper to get that hand out from the Feds again, so NOLA officials could take the money…and run away.

2 Responses to “Been There, Done That…”

1. Mr. Bingley says:

   September 5, 2005 at 10:01 am

   Wow. Good find, Sis.

2. tree hugging sister says:

   September 5, 2005 at 11:00 am

   There’s Google full of them. Someone in Chrenkoff’s comments got me going ~ I remembered last year, prior to Ivan and I was seriously considering how to get Major Dad out of here, news interviews of people stuck on I-10 (you get an idea how stuck they were, if they could be interviewed while on an interstate) out of NOLA, who’d taken 10 hours to go 7 miles.
   So, we weren’t going anywhere. I shoved a couple more Percoset in him and hoped for the best, instead.