AP Warned of New Orleans Disaster

NewsMax ^ | 9/3/05 | NewsMax

[wagglebee]

Just last year the Associated Press predicted all of the failures that have became part of the Katrina tragedy - but the story was about another hurricane, Hurricane Ivan.

When Ivan aimed its fury at the Big Easy, the AP detailed what could happen if the hurricane slammed into New Orleans.

In the case of Ivan, serious problems were caused by a lack of planning for a cataclysmic storm, yet with Katrina on the horizon, the lessons of Ivan were all but forgotten.

A feckless state governor and New Orleans' mayor repeated the same mistakes they made with Ivan, and hundreds of thousands of largely poor people were forced to endure conditions that one associates with the Third World - not the richest nation on the planet.

The disaster in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will come as no surprise to those who recall a September 19, 2004 Associated Press report.

Wrote the AP: "Those who had the money to flee Hurricane Ivan ran into hours-long traffic jams. Those too poor to leave the city had to find their own shelter - a policy that was eventually reversed, but only a few hours before the deadly storm struck land."

Eventually, tens of thousands of New Orleanans were directed to the Superdome - where no food, water or living facilities were provided for the massive number of refugees expected to remain there for at least several days. Fortunately few arrived.

Noted the AP then: "New Orleans dodged the knockout punch many feared from the hurricane, but the storm exposed what some say are significant flaws in the Big Easy's civil disaster plans."

Noting that much of the city lies below sea level, only kept dry by a system of pumps and levees, the AP recalled that as Hurricane Ivan approached the Gulf coast from the Gulf of Mexico, the city - warned by forecasters that a direct hit could send torrents of Mississippi River backwash over the city's levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste - urged more than a million people to flee the wrath of the oncoming storm.

But nobody told them how to flee Ivan.

As happened before Katrina struck, residents who had cars took to the highways while the AP reported others wondered what to do.

"'They say evacuate, but they don't say how I'm supposed to do that,' Latonya Hill, 57, said at the time. 'If I can't walk it or get there on the bus, I don't go. I don't got a car. My daughter don't either.'

"'If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature,'" Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU told the AP.

In the case of Katrina, there was huge fleet of school buses the mayor could have dispatched to aid in evacuating people unable to leave on their own. Instead, the buses sat in parking lots that later flooded, making them unusable when tens of thousands were stranded in the flooded city.

Dealing with safeguarding the city's population had always been a problem, the AP recalled, adding that the situation was worse at the time of Ivan since the Red Cross had stopped providing shelters in New Orleans for hurricanes rated above Category 2. Stronger hurricanes were deemed too dangerous, and Ivan was a much more powerful Category 4.

In the case of Ivan, city officials first said they would provide no shelter, then just as they later did with Katrina, they agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs. Only Wednesday afternoon - with Ivan just hours away - did the city open the 20-story-high domed stadium to the public.

Mayor Ray Nagin's spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the Superdome as Ivan approached, but said the evacuation was the top priority.

"Our main focus is to get the people out of the city," she told the AP.

"We did the compassionate thing by opening the shelter," Nagin said. "We wanted to make sure we didn't have a repeat performance of what happened before. We didn't want to see people cooped up in the Superdome for days."

Noted the AP story: "When another dangerous hurricane, Georges, appeared headed for the city in 1998, the Superdome was opened as a shelter and an estimated 14,000 people poured in." But just as happened after Katrina, the AP reported there were problems, including theft and vandalism.

With Ivan approaching, far fewer took refuge from the storm - an estimated 1,100 - at the Superdome, and there was far greater security: 300 National Guardsmen.

Wrote the AP of the Ivan debacle: "The main safety measure - getting people out of town - raised its own problems. More than 1 million people tried to leave the city and surrounding suburbs on Tuesday, creating a traffic jam as bad as or worse than the evacuation that followed Georges. In the afternoon, state police took action, reversing inbound lanes on southeastern Louisiana interstates to provide more escape routes. Bottlenecks persisted, however.

"Col. Henry Whitehorn, head of state police, said he believed his agency acted appropriately, but also acknowledged he never expected a seven-hour-long crawl for the 60 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

"It was so bad that some broadcasters were telling people to stay home, that they had missed their window of opportunity to leave. They claimed the interstates had turned into parking lots where trapped people could die in a storm surge.

"Gov. Kathleen Blanco and [Mayor] Nagin both acknowledged the need to improve traffic flow and said state police should consider reversing highway lanes earlier. They also promised meetings with governments in neighboring localities and state transportation officials to improve evacuation plans.

But it appears that nothing had been changed by the time Katrina made its appearance in the Gulf.

After Ivan, Blanco and other state officials boasted that, while irritating, the clogged escape routes got people out of the most vulnerable areas.

"We were able to get people out," state Commissioner of Administration Jerry Luke LeBlanc said. "It was successful. There was frustration, yes. But we got people out of harm's way."

After Katrina struck, however, escape routes out of the city were clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic, leaving some motorists on the road when the Hurricane arrived.

A new photo from AP shows a huge fleet of school buses lined up in a now flooded parking lot - what appears to be enough transportation sufficient to have evacuated many of those stranded in the city and left to endure unimaginable conditions - transportation that the mayor failed to use when there was still time to use it.

The lessons of Ivan were never learned, and the people of New Orleans paid the price.

[wagglebee]

A feckless state governor and New Orleans' mayor repeated the same mistakes they made with Ivan, and hundreds of thousands of largely poor people were forced to endure conditions that one associates with the Third World - not the richest nation on the planet.

If Nagin and Blanco had an ounce of pride, they would resign in disgrace.

[ncountylee]

A feckless state governor and New Orleans' mayor repeated the same mistakes they made with Ivan, and hundreds of thousands of largely poor people were forced to endure conditions that one associates with the Third World - not the richest nation on the planet.

Double hanging would be fitting.

[big'ol_freeper]

Ping

[plain talk]

Eventually, tens of thousands of New Orleanans were directed to the Superdome - where no food, water or living facilities were provided for the massive number of refugees expected to remain there for at least several days. Fortunately few arrived.

Incredible ineptness at the local level.

[wagglebee]

If military commanders demonstrated this degree of incompetence, they would be relieved of command and court martialed for dereliction of duty.

[Darksheare]

Seppeku.
The only honorable out for them, but they have no honor.

[DJ Taylor]

"If Nagin and Blanco had an ounce of pride, they would resign in disgrace."

But they don't, so they'll simply blame President Bush for their incompetence.

[dfwgator]

Democrats: "You F'd Up, You Trusted Us."

[rottndog]

...but they have no honor.


What do you expect? They are Democrats.

[Darksheare]

True.
It is a bit of a stretch to expect honor form the left.

[Polybius]

Just last year the Associated Press predicted all of the failures that have became part of the Katrina tragedy -

Forget about the Associated Press. They have no particular credibility in such matters.

What matters is that scientists at LSU and the Federal Government have been predicting this nightmare scenario for years.

The levies surrounding the New Orleans flood basin was not designed to cope with anything above a Category 3.

Katrina was predicted as a Category 5 and hit as a Category 4.

Hypothetical Hurricane Pam..........a hypothetical, slow moving, Class 3 storm used as a worst-case scenario for New Orleans

Hurricane Pam Exercise Concludes Release Date: July 23, 2004

Note that in the 2004 Hurricane Pam Excersise:

"....in the New Orleans area. More than one million residents evacuated and Hurricane Pam destroyed 500,000-600,000 buildings."

Everybody got that?

The "Hurricane Pam" scenario called for the evacuation of New Orleans BEFORE New Orleans was destroyed and FEMA's job was to then come in and clean up the mess.

The Democrat Governor of Louisianna and the Democrat Mayor of New Orleans did NOTHING to evacuate New Orleans' low-income population although hundreds of city-owned buses remained neatly parked in city-owned parking lots.

[roses of sharon]

Resign? But their PR firms, the US media, have told the WORLD that THEY WERE THE VICTIMS OF GEORGE W BUSH.

He was sunbathing, playing guitar, and golfing while black people died, don't ya know.

Bastards, I am sick of their slandering of the US and its President.

[johnny7]

Set them loose in the Astrodome... and let nature take its course.

[kcordell]

If Nagin and Blanco had an ounce of pride, they would resign in disgrace.

So should the Levee Commission. If they had upgraded the levees instead of buying a casino this could have been averted.

[IronMan04]

I am not sure how many hurricanes you have had to evacuate from but I have had to do so at least 15 times with only two actually necessary. The Evacuation for Katrina ran much more smooth than that for Ivan. The few Roads out of town were converted to Contraflow on Saturday afternoon and the mayor STRONGLY suggested that people evacuate on Saturday morning.

Even with an evacuation underway by Noon on Saturday and all lanes on all roads open traffic was bumper to bumper from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. The Buses would have only complicated matters and even during a "Mandatory Evacuation" people are still Free to Stay in their homes.

[geopyg]

"...did NOTHING to evacuate New Orleans' low-income population..."

That's not true. In their emergency plan they TOLD the people to find a ride with a friend or relative. (Note that NO has an avg. of about 14% that use mass transit - so presumablly many/most of those people don't have cars.

And I would offer a ride to someone, but by the time I load my wife, three kids, dog, cat and supplies in the minivan - we're stopping by to pickup grandma on the way out.

[IronMan04]

Being from Georgia you may not understand the levees are not build or maintained on the local level, they are a responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers.

[blake6900]

It's clear the mayor of New Orleans was--and is--an incompetent boob. Or perhaps he's just a corrupt politician. We'll find out soon enough.

New Yorkers should thank God Rudy Guiliani was the mayor of their city at the time of the 9/11 attacks and not his predecessor, David Dinkins, who was both an incompetent boob and a corrupt politician.

I wonder if the New Orleans mayor is a Dinkins protege.

[freekitty]

Nothing gets done; because that's not the politicians agenda. They are way to busy living the high life off of our backs.

[MrBambaLaMamba]

"... Eventually, tens of thousands of New Orleanans were directed to the Superdome ... "

And they went!