[weegee]

He says it's the slowest mandatory evacuation ever, and he wants to know why they were told to go to the Convention Center area in the first place

Poor planning. Same as sending people to the Superdome for shelter when the roof was not safe for such purposes.

Civil Defense used to mean something in this country.

Now it is all about skyboxes and tourism (including convention business).

Taxpayers have been had.

And for "smart growth" types who insist on not widening highways and push instead for increasing population density "downtown", it does nothing to help evacuate a city if a natural or man-made disaster occurs.

[combat_boots]

See this post about buses: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1475820/posts?page=351#351. Also read the one thereafter about the 400 at the head of the line.

[Arkie2]

Since you mentioned highways I thought I would bring up an interesting point. I watched pictures of the traffic streaming out of NO the day before the hurricane and I saw that only the left two lanes were being used. The inbound lanes were still open to traffic heading into NO and there was very little of that.

In South Carolina all Interstate lanes are made one way to expedite the evacuation and no inbound traffic is allowed, even to the point of being arrested if you try it. I wonder why that wasn't done in La.

[chris1]

Agreed. I was flamed like hell before for daring to say that the govt on all levels here is to blame with piss poor planning and logistics.

Shepard Smith onFox clearly said that they were prohibiting people from walking over the bridge. This call confirms that.

To me this is the height of criminal negligence on the part of the govt. At this point, can anyone blame anyone for looting food and supplies?

[hedgetrimmer]

Every point you make is spot on. This hurricane, I hope, marks the death of "smart growth" and traffic calming in this country. The dual socialist agenda of packing people into dense housing and creating impossible situations for driving private vehicles mean harm and death to our citizenry and those in our government pushing these agendas need to lose their jobs immediately!

[Natty Bumppo@frontier.net]

And for "smart growth" types who insist on not widening highways and push instead for increasing population density "downtown", it does nothing to help evacuate a city if a natural or man-made disaster occurs

Weegee, you have identified the most important lesson learned from this tragedy to date: Above a certain population density, it requires a tremendous amount of properly functioning technology to sustain order. You can build as densely as you want, but when the technology fails (AND IT WILL) or is destroyed, you must have a rapid, foolproof means to evacuate and disperse the population.

From a tactical point of view, it appears that without mass transit, at least 20% of the population of New Orleans was only foot mobile. For reasons of age, health, and lifestyle, that part of the population was incapable of conducting effective movement by foot. The problem in New Orleans is not a lack of supplies, but (similar to my usual Bridge hands) a lack of transportation and distribution. (This was also the major issue during tsunami relief efforts as well.)

By its centralized nature, mass transit will be the first thing to fail in a disaster. If you want to be able to effectively evacuate a city in a timely fashion, you had better pour a lot more concrete (and money) into the Interstate highway system, because when the crunch comes, individual vehicles (those "hated" SUVs) may be all you have.

Management will always choose efficiency over redundancy. It is a natural result of a free market and the profit motive. (One of the hardest lessons to teach military unit leaders is the need to keep a force in reserve. There are a lot of painful "lessons relearned" behind the concept of 1/3 of the force being held in reserve.)

If the "grid;" be it power, water, sewage, information, or supplies; is efficient it is by nature fragile because there is limited excess capacity. I am sure a lot of companies in the area had their Business Continuity Plans and Disaster Preparedness Plans put through the wringer in the last four days and most failed spectacularly because the companies chose low cost over redundancy to ensure reliability .

To effectively deal with the displacement of over a million people requires excess capacity in our housing, transportation, education, health, and job markets. It may not have existed at landfall, but the beauty of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" is that it is being created as I type.