Isn’t waiting until Sunday pushing it a bit?
The storm will be close enough to land by Mon morning that I would imagine travel would not likely be possible in many places.
They need to be heading out yesterday.
There is a lot less people to evacuate this time. Orleans Parish alone has probably lost some 200,000 in population since Katrina. St. Bernard’s to the east has lost over 40,000 (from a starting point of 65,000 pre-Katrina). Jefferson Parish to west and south lost some 25,000. Plaquemines Parish, which is the little hamlets heading south from Orleans to the Mississippi’s mouth, lost about a quarter of it’s 28,000 population. And next to Texas, Rita reduced Cameron Parish by over 2,000 (from a starting point of less than 10,000).
If the current tracks hold, the parishes between Cameron and the Mississippi Parishes, such as Terrebonne and Lafourche, may be in line for the worst damage. And their populations haven’t shrunk — those two parishes alone have some 200,000 people.
To be honest, it’s silly for so many people to be living permanently south of I-10 on low-lying land that’s a swamp built out of Mississippi silt. If this storm is as a bad as Katrina or Rita, then the Feds need to do what they did along the upper Mississippi and take away the incentives to rebuild and aim them at people relocating.