The mayor of NO and many other people thought New Orleans had been spared the worst after the storm had passed.
Even into TUESDAY, THE DAY AFTER, stories such as this were being written:
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Band will play on in 'lucky' New Orleans
BY ADAM LISBERG
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/341842p-291887c.html
New Orleans yesterday was like a drunken reveler on the morning after Mardi Gras - woozy but still standing, and glad that it got lucky.
Even with several neighborhoods submerged, buildings downed and some residents feared dead, the jazz city dodged the worst of what Hurricane Katrina had to offer - and the doomsday flooding, damage and deaths that would have come from a direct hit.
The monster storm lost power in the early morning hours and weakened to a still-ferocious Category 4 by daybreak, but it saved the city by veering a mere 30 miles to the east.
"New Orleans was spared," said Stanley Gedzelman, a professor of Earth & atmospheric science at New York's City College. "It missed by a short distance, but that difference was just enough to save the city."
The shift meant Katrina's hellish winds blew from the north instead of the south, so they didn't sweep a deluge of seawater into the low-lying city.
Just as importantly, the feared storm surge never seriously breached the levees that protect New Orleans from the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other.
But the storm still managed to rip holes in the Superdome, blow down walls in the historic French Quarter, tear apart the sides of downtown high-rises and put some of the swampiest neighborhoods underwater.
"It looks like a war zone, with tree branches down everywhere," John Hazard, 44, said from the uptown New Orleans home of his brother-in-law Bill Hines.
Rescuers who ventured out to the hardest-hit areas reported residents stranded on rooftops and screaming for help.
Emergency officials cautioned Katrina would surely claim lives of those who ignored a mandatory evacuation order.
"Everybody who had a way or wanted to get out of the way of this storm was able to," said Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland security chief. "For some that didn't, it was their last night on this Earth."
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So, how was Brown supposed to know what and when to send help, if the mayor himself and that idiot Blanco didn't know what was happening on the ground?
Great post. Man, people are dumb.