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I am sure you are right but wasn't the brunt of the hurricane originally supposed to make a direct hit on N.O. only? Then I think ,at the last minute, the hurricane, turned direction, maybe towards Mississippi , and authorities didn't have time to get the word out.My friends want me to explain why all these people [thousands?] didn't make it out in time and I don't know what to tell them.

Because some people don't listen when they're told to leave. People don't want to believe bad things. They've made it through hurricanes before and so they believed they would again.

In most cases, it wasn't the hurricane that killed them, it was the huge surge of water that came AFTER the hurricane that killed them.

We don't know the numbers yet, so don't get your friends worked up until we know for sure.

Basically, I think a lot of the people in MS and AL thought they were not the target of the hurricane because all you heard on the news was NO. That may have lulled a lot of people into thinking they would be OK.

most coastal residents understand that being in the NE quadrant of a storm is BAD, so a hit on NO would be clearly very bad for the MS gulf coast, regardless of what CNN says.

as for why thousands 'didn't make it out on time,' many of them willingly stayed, and those living any distance from the beach would, based on experience, have expected wind damage to be the primary threat.

as noted elsewhere on this thread, if you live on the coast for any period of time, you develop a certain numbness to the ongoing hurricane watches/warnings. It is not in human nature to evacuate once or twice a year with nearly all being false alarms, aside from issues such as employment conflicts, etc. This is not helped by the fact that once you DO evacuate, you can expect to not be allowed back for a week or more even if your house is fine if there is a hurricane strike anywhere near.

I also imagine that some who planned to stay for the above reasons were simply unprepared to leave when and if they realized what kindof storm surge they were looking at...but think - would you expect to flood 2 miles from the beach?