Posted on 05/02/2006 10:43:59 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
NEW ORLEANS - Mayor Ray Nagin unveiled a new evacuation strategy for New Orleans on Tuesday that relies more on buses and trains and eliminates the Superdome and Convention Center as shelters.
"There will be no shelter of last resort," Nagin declared.
The mayor, facing a runoff election May 20, has been widely criticized for failing to get the city's most vulnerable residents out of town as Hurricane Katrina approached.
The Superdome and Morial Convention Center became a scene of misery for days after the Aug. 29 hurricane as thousands of evacuees, many of them ill or elderly, languished with shortages of food and water.
In the future, Nagin said, the Convention Center will be a staging point for evacuations, not a shelter.
"Amtrak trains will also be used for evacuation purposes, which we're really excited about," Nagin said. He said federal Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had cleared the way for the use of passenger trains.
Nagin added that the city's communications infrastructure is being beefed up and that contingency for communication failures had been developed.
The new plan also touches on a heart-wrenching decision evacuees faced ahead of Katrina: To board the buses, they had to leave their pets, and some refused to go without them. In the future, evacuees will be allowed to bring pets with them as long as they have some type of cage to safely put them in.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin speaks in New Orleans, April 22, 2006. Nagin said on Wednesday he had settled a fight with disaster officials over trailer parks in the city, giving hope to people still seeking temporary housing months after Hurricane Katrina. (Lee Celano/Reuters)
Did he give priority to chocolates or is that implicit?
Conviently, his evacuation plan doubles as a "get out the vote" plan...
relies more on buses
Not unless he makes then amphibious.
Nagin gets a mulligan.
Evacuate the chocolate city.
Yeah, I bet Amtrak's all atwitter about the possibility of evacuating "Nagin's Raiders!" Ugh.
Would this be "Last in, first out..." ?
In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a "dead-head" train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. "We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.
Yeah, LIFO!
The designated evacuation shelters will have to stockpile cat food, dog food and some pooper scoopers for future evacuations.
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I was expecting a link to Scrappleface but see that its a real article. Amazing.
LOL.
Stephen Colbert's funniest line at the WH correspondents' dinner was when he welcomed Mayor Nagin to Washington DC, "the chocolate city with a soft marshmallow center."
I think they need to ShUT DOWN New orleans, and ask the last person out of town to turn off the lights. I am glad I didn't give any money to sink in a rat hole. Foolish people build on flood plains, and stupid build below sea level.
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