Why any evacuation plan/shelter plan was doomed:
I have lived in the South most of my life. I lived in Covington; my wife and her family lived in Louisiana (my wife until we were married 22 years ago.) I still have two brothers in the south Louisiana area, I hope. This to give a view on my perspective.
Society has classes today as much as any time in the past. It comes from a natural desire to group with people of like mind and background. Witness Free Republic, for goodness sake. These classes should not be thought of as a rigid caste system, and not necessarily hierarchical. It is a social thing, such as a voluntary family. I tried to think about some of the groups in New Orleans that I know of and how they would react.
The Lawless: Street gangs and hangers on. They would have looked at this order, if they heard it, with suspicion. They would think of going to the Superdome as a trap. They do not trust authority.
The long time East siders: (This is where they are doing most of the plucking of people from roofs.) Many look back to Betse and the fact that the city does not take care of them. Their fathers had to care for themselves with no help from the city. Or so the story would have been retold. They were not going to go somewhere that they had to rely on the city.
The religious poor: This group would have counted on God to care for them. And they would not have wanted to go to the Superdome and expose themselves to the criminal element that they thought would be there. They had no way out and yet thought that they were in more danger from the groups now doing the looting than from a storm.
The young: "I am immortal. It is always the other guy that gets hurt. It will turn anyway, they always do."
The affluent: "This house was built to withstand anything. I'm certainly not associating with those at the shelter, nor am I going to become a refugee. Besides, I have to keep people from looting this place."
To a lot of these people, the hurricane last year was as bad as they thought it could get. It was magnitudes above that.
This is also not an attempt to defend the lack of real planning that seems to have been done beforehand. Knowing that one in six families had no way out, what could they do with them? If the Superdome was the only available shelter, they would have had to put 250,000+ in there if everyone had obeyed the order. There were no other places to put a shelter that had a good enough survivability without sending them somewhere else. They had made no arrangements for that. Lack of planning doomed a lot of people to a horrible time or death. I feel for them all.
A most insightful post, and likely right on target.
A very interesting and astute take on the situation.
Having lived through a great flood in 1972, I can say that thirty years later, we still have the same divides and same classes in our larger society.
I pray to God that the people of New Orleans will survive this disaster, and come back, as the people of Pennsylvania did after Hurricane Agnes.