In contrast, we have the gross and possibly criminal negligence on the part of the Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, who failed to follow their own evacuation plan prior to the landfall of Katrina.
New Orleans is in a Storm Surge Zone, below sea level, and surrounded by levies that were only designed to withstand storms lass than a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane. That means that any person staying in New Orleans during a Category 3 or higher hurricane is facing a very high risk of death. Katrina was forecast as a Category 5 and hit as a Category 4.
What Is "Storm Surge" and Why It Matters.
The 2004 Hurricane Pam Exercise was modeled on a catastrophic destruction of New Orleans after only a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane. It was based on the assumption that there had been a complete evacuation of New Orleans. Shelters outside of the New Orleans flood bowl had already been identified:
Hurricane Pam Exercise Concludes.(2004 New Orleans Disaster Prediction)
President Bush requested that Governor Blanco allow the Federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, and Governor Blanco, for political reasons, refused:
The Southeast Louisiana Evacuation plan supplement, revised in 2000, page 13, read paragraph 5, stated:
5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.
In spite of that,over four hundred New Orleans publicly owned buses remained parked in neat rows and 200,000 low-income New Orleans residents were left trapped in the ¡§New Orleans flood bowl¡¨ (as scientists call it) in the face of the incoming storm surge.
Those 400+ buses, at 70 passengers per bus, could have taken 28,000 of those low-income citizens per trip out of New Orleans on the inbound lanes that the Governor and Mayor inexplicably left unused during the evacuation.
As a result, 200,000 of the poorest residents of New Orleans were left trapped in a disaster waiting to happen with nowhere to go but the unpoliced Superdome.
While 800,000 of New Orleans' residents with private transportation were saved, 200,000 of New Orleans' low-income residents were left abandoned by the Governor and the Mayor in the New Orleans flood bowl to face a Category 4 Hurricane Storm Surge.
They were later trapped in the flood that scientist had long predicted and it was then left to the Federal Government to rescue 200,000 souls that should never have been put into such a predicament.
That is criminal negligence by Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.
If the levies had failed catastrophically instead of at a few certain point as they did, the death toll in New Orleans would have reached Hiroshima proportions.