[Knitting A Conundrum]

Like I have said at least 3 times, I never thought of using them for after storm evacuations. In fact, I was one of the ones that said the roads and bridges have to be recertified.

As it is, if people wanted to do trains in advance, they would have to have it organized in advance. Nobody could just say, duh! but the planners and organizers if they wanted to use rail as an option could have certainly had it planned in advance with Amtrak. But, and this is a valid point, people outside of the NE corridor don't think about train travel. When I last took the train back about 85, the Crescent ran one train a day from NO to DC, and one the opposite way. I suspect schedules like that could have been worked with.

I do understand how train schedules work and such. I was thinking why hasn't this become part of a master plan? And I think the answer is, no body thinks about it, so there are no contingency equipment or ways to use the trains, and considering their ability to move people easily and in number it's a shame. Ah well.

It's like leaving the school busses in the bus barn. Why didn't they put that into the master plan as well?

Could have been done, if someone thought about it and was prepared for it, and hadn't tried to wish the storm away a whole extra day.

Thank God we don't have to evacuate large cities often. The experience here in NO shows how hard it is to do it on short notice, and how many things nobody's going to think about doing cause their contingency plans aren't real enough.


Speaking of trains.

I've been looking at some high res pics of NO East, and there are derailed train cars, tossed and turned everywhere you look. I knew they moved a lot of freight in NO, but it takes a moment like this to bring home how important a nexus point for trade NO has been.

I though I still had the link for the site up, but I cloesed it. It's a NOAA site, I think. I got to it through the WDSU website.

[jeffers]

NO East was in the mouth of a surge funnel. So was St. Bernard Parish.

Look at the levee maps.

This was well known long before the storm.

[Amalie]

Your point on rail infrastructure damage is well-taken. This will have a major impact on commodities availability (not to mention pricing) in the next few months. This is also why rebuilding NO is an important issue - you need to have a city to man a port, and THIS is the port. Boats in, boats out; rail in, rail out. The farmers who need transportation to move crops are in for a tough row, as are those nations who rely on our coal and agri exports. There is NO OTHER practical way to move this amount of material.