It's really sad that people did not listen , it sure would have been better to error on the side of safety. They had plenty of time. The City should have had a better plan for the elderly, and the poor that didn't the ability to vacate. State officials knew how serious it was and shouldn't have given people a choice.
It's really sad. People rushed to Sri Lanka but the thought of not rushing a different group to deal with the dead floating, decaying is hard to take, especially in America. Hate to say it but even Castro in Cuba, evacuated it's people. We will pull through and help our own.
The shocking thing is how many submerged cars are being shown on the videos of NO. Most of them are on the roads or in parking lots, indicating that they were fully functional before the flood. That means a lot of the people who could and should have evacuated didn't. That, and the looting, causes me to have a lot less sympathy for many of those who remain than I otherwise would have.