Posted on 09/03/2005 12:34:27 PM PDT by wagglebee
Just last year the Associated Press predicted all of the failures that have became part of the Katrina tragedy - but the story was about another hurricane, Hurricane Ivan.
When Ivan aimed its fury at the Big Easy, the AP detailed what could happen if the hurricane slammed into New Orleans.
In the case of Ivan, serious problems were caused by a lack of planning for a cataclysmic storm, yet with Katrina on the horizon, the lessons of Ivan were all but forgotten.
A feckless state governor and New Orleans' mayor repeated the same mistakes they made with Ivan, and hundreds of thousands of largely poor people were forced to endure conditions that one associates with the Third World - not the richest nation on the planet.
The disaster in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will come as no surprise to those who recall a September 19, 2004 Associated Press report.
Wrote the AP: "Those who had the money to flee Hurricane Ivan ran into hours-long traffic jams. Those too poor to leave the city had to find their own shelter - a policy that was eventually reversed, but only a few hours before the deadly storm struck land."
Eventually, tens of thousands of New Orleanans were directed to the Superdome - where no food, water or living facilities were provided for the massive number of refugees expected to remain there for at least several days. Fortunately few arrived.
Noted the AP then: "New Orleans dodged the knockout punch many feared from the hurricane, but the storm exposed what some say are significant flaws in the Big Easy's civil disaster plans."
Noting that much of the city lies below sea level, only kept dry by a system of pumps and levees, the AP recalled that as Hurricane Ivan approached the Gulf coast from the Gulf of Mexico, the city - warned by forecasters that a direct hit could send torrents of Mississippi River backwash over the city's levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste - urged more than a million people to flee the wrath of the oncoming storm.
But nobody told them how to flee Ivan.
As happened before Katrina struck, residents who had cars took to the highways while the AP reported others wondered what to do.
"'They say evacuate, but they don't say how I'm supposed to do that,' Latonya Hill, 57, said at the time. 'If I can't walk it or get there on the bus, I don't go. I don't got a car. My daughter don't either.'
"'If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature,'" Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU told the AP.
In the case of Katrina, there was huge fleet of school buses the mayor could have dispatched to aid in evacuating people unable to leave on their own. Instead, the buses sat in parking lots that later flooded, making them unusable when tens of thousands were stranded in the flooded city.
Dealing with safeguarding the city's population had always been a problem, the AP recalled, adding that the situation was worse at the time of Ivan since the Red Cross had stopped providing shelters in New Orleans for hurricanes rated above Category 2. Stronger hurricanes were deemed too dangerous, and Ivan was a much more powerful Category 4.
In the case of Ivan, city officials first said they would provide no shelter, then just as they later did with Katrina, they agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs. Only Wednesday afternoon - with Ivan just hours away - did the city open the 20-story-high domed stadium to the public.
Mayor Ray Nagin's spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the Superdome as Ivan approached, but said the evacuation was the top priority.
"Our main focus is to get the people out of the city," she told the AP.
"We did the compassionate thing by opening the shelter," Nagin said. "We wanted to make sure we didn't have a repeat performance of what happened before. We didn't want to see people cooped up in the Superdome for days."
Noted the AP story: "When another dangerous hurricane, Georges, appeared headed for the city in 1998, the Superdome was opened as a shelter and an estimated 14,000 people poured in." But just as happened after Katrina, the AP reported there were problems, including theft and vandalism.
With Ivan approaching, far fewer took refuge from the storm - an estimated 1,100 - at the Superdome, and there was far greater security: 300 National Guardsmen.
Wrote the AP of the Ivan debacle: "The main safety measure - getting people out of town - raised its own problems. More than 1 million people tried to leave the city and surrounding suburbs on Tuesday, creating a traffic jam as bad as or worse than the evacuation that followed Georges. In the afternoon, state police took action, reversing inbound lanes on southeastern Louisiana interstates to provide more escape routes. Bottlenecks persisted, however.
"Col. Henry Whitehorn, head of state police, said he believed his agency acted appropriately, but also acknowledged he never expected a seven-hour-long crawl for the 60 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
"It was so bad that some broadcasters were telling people to stay home, that they had missed their window of opportunity to leave. They claimed the interstates had turned into parking lots where trapped people could die in a storm surge.
"Gov. Kathleen Blanco and [Mayor] Nagin both acknowledged the need to improve traffic flow and said state police should consider reversing highway lanes earlier. They also promised meetings with governments in neighboring localities and state transportation officials to improve evacuation plans.
But it appears that nothing had been changed by the time Katrina made its appearance in the Gulf.
After Ivan, Blanco and other state officials boasted that, while irritating, the clogged escape routes got people out of the most vulnerable areas.
"We were able to get people out," state Commissioner of Administration Jerry Luke LeBlanc said. "It was successful. There was frustration, yes. But we got people out of harm's way."
After Katrina struck, however, escape routes out of the city were clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic, leaving some motorists on the road when the Hurricane arrived.
A new photo from AP shows a huge fleet of school buses lined up in a now flooded parking lot - what appears to be enough transportation sufficient to have evacuated many of those stranded in the city and left to endure unimaginable conditions - transportation that the mayor failed to use when there was still time to use it.
The lessons of Ivan were never learned, and the people of New Orleans paid the price.
What it said:
Responsibilities of the New Orleans District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, are almost entirely in civil works. Flood control, navigation and the environment are the big jobs.
What you said:
Interestingly the US Army Corps of Engineers claims to have the primary responsibility for maintaining the Levee System.
You are truly amazing! You must know the former statement does not necessarily mean what you've said it means. "Flood control, navigation and the environment are the big jobs" does not equate to "the US Army Corps of Engineers claims to have the primary responsibility for maintaining the Levee System".
With all due respect many of the statements you've written here have made your credibility questionable at best. You're the same individual who's been saying the Mayor didn't mishandle this situation and, in your mind, did the best he could. In fact, you've implied he did a stellar job considering the circumstances. However, as time goes by we're finding that not to be the case. Of course, you're also the same individual that believed using the local school buses for evacuation purposes would have "complicated matters"...your words, not mine
I should have known from that point on you were not to be taken seriously.
I'm sorry your state and local governments were inept in the dealing with this tragedy. But the reality is they were. They had the first hands on the situation and they failed miserably. And it says much about the State of Louisiana and its' inability to plan ahead. You guys lived in a city in a bowl and it appears your "disaster plan" and "evacuation procedures" either were inadequate or not followed.
Your local officials let you down. That's becoming more clearer as days go by. Your mayor goes on the radio Thursday night and screams "We need 500 buses, man!" when literally hundreds of buses were available before the storm came or the levees broke. Where is Mayor Nagin now. Why isn't he answering questions. The answer is he's hiding because he doesn't have an acceptable response to why he didn't use them.
It is comforting, though, to see Gov. Blano has asked for school buses and drivers in her public health emergency proclamation yesterday. Of course, why it took her so long to issue it in the first place is a good question. Perhaps she got the advice from the former Clinton FEMA head she's hired. It's obvious she didn't come up with the idea on her own.
Ya know, you folks really should demand her and Mayor Nagin's resignations immediately.
The local officials and the federal officials let New Orleans down. The Gov and both US Senators failed. And yes David Vitter is a Republican and he failed just like Sen Hillary Clone and the Gov. But, FEMA's failure will be the greatest as everyone in America now knows that there is not plan to deal with disaster in their town.
Finally, the people that stayed in their homes choose not to leave knowing they would be looted by neighbors
Well, looks like you guys got your money's worth. Sometimes people (like policemen and school bus drivers) just have to do the right thing. Or at least should. Apparently that's an impossibility in New Orleans. The pay rate of school bus drivers is irrelevant since your mayor never ordered the buses be used. A nineteen year old kid took a bus, filled it with victims and drove it to Houston. When he was asked "why" he said he couldn't just sit there and do nothing. That kid did the right thing. Apparently many in your local police force and your bus drivers couldn't, or more likely, wouldn't.
BTW, that same corrupt leadership that has existed in Louisiana for years fought tooth and nail to keep the Feds out. What a difference a few days make. Now they're bi!ching that the Feds didn't get there soon enough. And I've never mentioned political parties in any of my posts.
Lastly, on what basis do you free the US Army Corps of Engineers of responsibility of the Levees?
I never said that. I said a local levee commission, in my opinion, misused funds on nonessentials and all you did was chastise me for calling it by an incorrect name and telling me that in all the years you've lived in New Orleans you'd never heard of it. In fact you implied that I apparently did not know how to use Google. When I corrected myself, and used the proper name, you never responded to my original allegation.
And finally...
A million people evacuated in less than 48 hours will be seen as the great sucess of the local governments.
Perhaps that's true but that will be revisionist history when looked at in the context of how many more could have gotten out but didn't because of poor planning.
I mentioned earlier that local authorities knew that even though the Superdome was a place of last resort, there would be thousands showing up there. You've never answered why they didn't think to put any provisions there whatsoever during the days leading up to the storm hitting.
Perhaps it was because the truck drivers don't make enough money either.
FEMA was in Mississippi and Alabama because the governors of those states asked for help before the storm arrived. As of this writing your governor still had not handed control of the rescue operation completely to the Feds because to do so would admit she made a mistake in not doing it to begin with.
The mayor may not have jurisdiction over the Orleans Levee District (OLD) Commission but he does make an appointment to it along with the six appointments that the governor makes.
As for integration the neighborhood where I grew up was integrated since the 1930's and still is. New Orleans did not need the Feds to tell it how to integrate.
Oh, yeah?! Then how come the majority of people left behind were black. And how come your mayor gave priority to guests at the Hyatt? And you still haven't given a legitimate reason why the buses were parked unless you really believe your "reason" was legitimate.
Oh, yeah...I forgot. It's because cops and bus drivers don't make enough money to give a sh!t about their fellow citizens.
Look, your logic confounds me. If you want to give your governor and mayor a pass, then go ahead. I don't live there. You do. And judging from the way your state and local authorities have dealt with this, before, during and after, and how you defend them, I'm glad it's you living there and not me.
I'm done...
Allowing the poor people to evacuate would have complicated matters for whom? For you? I guess they don't matter. How convenient for you that you didn't have to share the road with them.
Only for those who were evacuated. But as has been pointed out repeatedly, those who weren't, apparently don't matter. Let them eat cake, right?
You have a real reading comprehension problem, don't you?
Yes...he does. I've tried dealing with him but ya can't talk sense to those who have none. I'm still trying to figure out his reasoning that not using the school buses was a good thing because doing so would have only (his words) "complicated matters".
Jeeez...
I told you. I never part up political parties. You must be the only person in the world that believes the evacuation was a success and I guess you reasoning is because you got out.
Yikes!
Now leave me alone. You're starting to frighten me.
I think I see the problem. He went from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1474029/posts?page=212#212 (inviting everyone to loot his house) to http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1476562/posts?page=15#15 (being thankful that the dregs weren't clogging his highway during evacation) in about three days. Apparently his hurricane preparedness plan involved leaving all the low income people in the path of the hurricane, and letting them rip each other to pieces for survival.
Over a million lives were saved.
There are not many people that are thankful that everyone didn't get out, you just happen to be one of them.
The only lesson the locals learned from Ivan is that "the storm will turn". Famous last words.
Hey, those poor people would have gotten in the way of rich people trying to evacuate their several real estate holdings. Give the man a break! He has all kinds of insurance forms to fill out now. Life is complicated enough without having to give a crap about poor people. /sarcasm
It may have savedc some lives during the storm. Afterwards the people would have been better off outside it
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