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.
To gain an additional 24 hours you would be saying that they should have started the evacuation on Friday morning instead of Saturday morning.
The 11:30 AM Friday morning official NHC track predicted landfall near Panama City Florida. At that point Apalachicola and Panama City had almost TWICE the probability of being the center of this event than New Orleans. Friday afternoon to evening is when things began to change dramatically, and by Sat morning it was clear that LA was at risk, and it was Saturday morning when the evacuation began.