The Friday morning track is not meaningless in the vein of discussion I was having. Someone posted that the evacuation order should have come 24 hours sooner. That would have put the voluntary evacuation order into Friday morning. As you are clearly aware, on Friday morning the track was for FL, so such an order at that point would have been unreasonable. That's it - that's the only point I was making.
And yes, the models started pointing to LA on Fri afternoon and evening, and were dead set on NOLA by Sat morning 5 AM. That's not in dispute. The question centered around the point at which it is reasonable evacuate of a major city.
Perhaps they could have advanced the voluntary evacuation by 10-12 hours (into Friday evening), but even at the point where the models began pointing to LA those same models showed a strike probability of less than 20% for NOLA. I am not yet persuaded that clear and convincing evidence existed to warrant an earlier evacuation order.
To begin a regular policy of evacuating at the point people are saying should have been done for Katrina would in my mind only serve to further jade people to the evacuation orders. The evacuation operations would necessarily be more numerous and therefore the opinion of the populace that the orders were simply hype and over-concern would be more rampant than it already is.
So how does a major city prepare and enact an emergency plan that is designed for 24-48 hours instead of the standard 72? Can it be done? I'm not convinced that it can.
Take this scenario - Friday 4 PM was the earliest reasonable prediction of a LA landfall, and at that point they were predicting a strong Cat III or weak Cat IV at landfall. That gives less than 60 hours from the point where the path shifted until the point at which hurricane force weather was being experienced in the area, and about 62 hours to actual landfall. The NOLA EMP required 72 hours for full implementation, as do most cities, and even in that plan their disaster models showed significant loss of life and property.
Public safety is a tough business, and there were (and are) a lot of people working their tails off dealing with this storm. And I guess I'm just tired of all the people out there who always seem to know what should have been done after the fact. Sorry for the rant.