> > 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

Shrug. I think you're just a lot more optimistic than me as far as what we think the government can really do. I mean they built the superdome in New Orleans I assume partly to be a shelter, and they told people to go there, and it worked and the people who went survived. You say they should be ready to take people to stadiums, schools, hotels, etc, but I'm pretty sure those things are already filling up without the government's telling people to go there. Plus I don't know why you assume they don't have plans as for where to take people, they're already moving people from the superdome to the astrodome, and they probably have other places to take them after that. It just takes a ton of time. It's insanely expensive and time consuming and complicated to organize the movement of large numbers of people, let alone millions of people who have a couple days to leave a state. There are some situations where it's better and more efficient to just leave it up to individuals to take care of themselves at first, and give them aid later when things start to calm down. When you're running from a natural disaster beaurocracy is probably not your best ally.