At what point should the evacuation order have been made mandatory? At a 15% strike probablity? 20%? 40%? Its not as easy as it sounds from the couch.
See it however you want; I'm not wasting time with people who are hell bent on revising the facts.
That's apples and oranges. Those people had the means to leave and chose to stay. Some 100,000 people in New Orleans did not have the means to leave, and there was no emergency planning to give them a way to get out.
Amen to that. No need to blame the officials just because they're Democrats. In the end, people left who wanted to and people stayed who wanted to. And since we are America, we don't leave people to suffer the consequences of their foolish choices. We are compassionate and bail them out. It's what we do.
I personally looked at every single model track from from every single computer model the entire life of Katrina, and every single forecast track, plotted on a map.
And I have software (Stormtrakker) that allows me to basically play a "movie" of the NHC forecast track and all the model tracks over time.
The NHC forecast landfall was moved to just west of the MS/AL border at 5PM on Friday and moved to New Orleans at 11PM on Friday. That's a fact. You're flat out wrong if you believe otherwise.
And like many people you completely misunderstand the strike probability tables; they only extend out 72 hours; they are not an indication of FINAL overall probability of a landfall, just the probability the storm will be within a certain number of miles of a given point WITHIN 72 HOURS...and they're based on a standard pattern around the NHC forecast track; the strike probs aren't done by hand or anything.
Let me put this to you in a very clear way. Every State has an EOC office. They know way ahead of time, long before the media idiots spout their stupidity, they notify every County in the State, the National guard, everyone that has anything to do with the safety and welfare of it's citizens in a potential disaster is notified. There are three stages, and they are almost always in the stage three which is monitoring. They had plenty of time to mobilize and save some lives, and they blew it. You cannot possibly save everyone, especially due to the ferocity of this Storm, but another 24 hours of evacuating could have saved many lives.
Anybody who was watching the models Friday afternoon even would have known NO was in serious danger.