"care to tell me how you're planning on going north, on foot - or any other direction for that matter, in these conditions."
Are you serious?
Since you seem to feel its ok to insult people's intelligence in this forum, I guess you are fair game. It's called a storm warning. If a person lives in New Orleans, a city planted between an ocean and a giant lake, it should be implied you understand you have a precarious situation. I was born in those parts and much of my family has lived there (Houma, Lake Charles, Algiers, New Orleans).
Thus, when a powerful hurricane is approaching and the call goes out to evacuate, you evacuate. If you truly had to go on foot, that's a tough call. I guess I'm just skeptical that all of these people really had no way out other than on foot.
Regardless, I'm guessing people in Sri Lanka would have happily walked 60 miles on foot to have had a chance to escape their tsunami.
As to your point, only you are suggesting that the solution is for people to start their trek on foot NOW. See, that's what warnings are for. The guy you chose to insult was making the point that the people in the Superdome essentially ignored the call to evacuate New Orleans, instead spending the day before the storm waiting in a line - so that someone else could take care of them.
If a thinking human is going to risk their safety by not heeding calls & pleads to evacuate, those people really have given up - except for the fact that so much of our cultural/political landscape now says that's a reasonable and valid decision -- and that people should vote with it, vote, that is, for a system in which those who choose the easy out (giving up) get via redistribution.
Not everybody heard the hurricane was actually going to hit. People who were there said the local channels downplayed it bigtime. My relatives thought they were trying not to rock the "tourist dollar" boat--but whatever, some people, maybe a lot of them, didn't think it was serious. My relatives watched the Weather Channel and other cable news, not just locals, and left early, even before the order went out. Others rely on local channels, maybe not very smart.