> I don't really know what you expected them to do,
>aside from making the levies stronger. Their plan
>for saving people from a hurricane was to tell
>everybody that there's a hurricane coming so they
>could get out of town. If the people don't decide
>to leave, they kind of have to expect to be on
>their own in the event of extreme damage. And it's
>not like New Orleans is the only place effected, if
>all the roads and towns and everything in the whole
>state around it weren't hit by a hurricane I'm sure
>there would be a lot more help. Also, we haven't
>had much experience with stopping crimes taking
>place in the middle of a lake, there aren't
>normally many good things to steal there.

Just saying "well, we told everyone to leave, and they didn't" isn't really doing anything. A city like New Orleans ought to have more defined evacuation procedures than "Ok, everybody stampede out of the city!" Some people didn't have the ability to leave, I'm sure. No car, regular buses all full--the best many of them could have done would be to just start walking inland.

Again, I would think New Orleans and Lousiana would have at least some bare-bones contingencies on what to do when a hurricane threatens. It should involve mobilizing the National Guard *before* the storm hits, to assist in evacuation, comandeering commercial bus lines if necessary to help evacuate people in as orderly a fashion as possible, and already having *some* idea in mind as to where you're going to take people (stadiums, schools, hotels, and other shelters outside of the expected highest danger areas.) This doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me, and in fact strikes me as something that would be fairly simple to draw up.

Again, hindsight is 20/20. For all I know, these plans *were* all drawn up, and just never got executed for some reason, or were only half-assed until it was too late. But it still seems to me that somebody, somewhere, should have planned for something like this, considering it was absolutely inevitable that it would happen.

-- Dave