NOLA's Evacuation Plan, Chapter And Verse

Supplement 1A (Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan):

"The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating."

The Louisiana State Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) further states, (and it is common boilerplate evacuation procedure within a state or local jurisdication) that state and local employees and other resources from unaffected or lightly affected areas can be utilized to help out in heavily affected areas.

Nagin and Blanco and Mary "Atom-Splitter" Landrieu keep saying that you can't force bus drivers to drive in the middle of a Category 5 Hurricane.

Ummm... excuse me if I'm just a moron rightwinger, but aren't evacuations typically supposed to occur before an impending disaster, not during it?

Apparently, in Louisiana, police, bus drivers, and emergency workers can't be required to work when the skies are hazy, overcast, or "overly dewey, but not in that sweet, romantic way."

Thanks to F15C.

I screwed up saying this on the show (panic!), but there were two critical points to the response to this disaster: Before and After. (You can't do anything during a hurricane, of course, without risking additional deaths.)

Before, the feds did everything right. They prepositioned supplies around the area and moved down troops.

The local officials did everything wrong.

After, the feds were arguably slow to respond (although, as Jack Kelly points out, they responded faster to Katrina than to Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew). And the local authorities by that point were clearly out of their league, and hence to be held blameless.

The media continues to focus only on the after part of the response.

But why was a quicker-than-the-record federal response so desperately needed?

Because the city was left full of people who were not evacuated previously-- something under the sole control of local officials. Had they been evacuated according to Louisiana's own (perfectly-achievable and sensible) plan, there would have been no one to rescue in the city.

See if you can follow this logic: Had the evacuation plan been executed, had 600 NO buses (and thousands of Louisiana buses) not been left idle during the storm, no one would have died. The federal response would have consisted entirely of property-damage assessment and fixing the broken levees and restoring power and turning on the pumps.

CNN wants its on-line interviewees to "get angry," but not about that.

That could hurt the Democrats, after all.

posted by Ace at 08:36 PM

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