Apparantly neither the major or the parrish president was concerned about the money being used to strengthen the levies.
Awaiting Ivan in the Big Uneasy
New Orleans Girds For Major Damage
By Michael Grunwald and Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
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The local officials said they could not order a mandatory evacuation in a city as poor as New Orleans, in which more than 100,000 residents have no cars, but they urged people to find some way to escape. "If you want to take a chance, buy a lottery ticket," said Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard. "Don't take a chance on this hurricane."
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin seemed flustered as he pleaded with his constituents to flee, at one point suggesting that they take shelter in area hospitals. Visitors were also urged to find somewhere else to go -- including 10,000 conventioneers in town for the annual meeting of the National Safety Council.
"This is not a drill," Nagin said. "This is the real deal."
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By evening, the city's few escape routes were spectacularly clogged, and authorities acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of residents would not get out in time. The stranded will not be able to turn to the Red Cross, because New Orleans is the only city in which the relief agency refuses to set up emergency storm shelters, to ensure the safety of its own staff. Even if a 30-foot-high wall of water crashes through the French Quarter -- Maestri's worst-case scenario -- stranded residents will be on their own.
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Most scientists, engineers and emergency managers agree that if Ivan does spare southern Louisiana this time, The One is destined to arrive someday. The director of the U.S. Geological Survey has warned that New Orleans is on a path to extinction. Gregory W. Stone, director of the Coastal Studies Institute at Louisiana State University, frets that near misses such as Hurricane Georges -- a Category 2 storm that swerved away from New Orleans a day before landfall in 1998 -- only give residents a false sense of security. The Red Cross has rated a hurricane inundating New Orleans as America's deadliest potential natural disaster -- worse than a California earthquake.
"I don't mean to be an alarmist, but the doomsday scenario is going to happen eventually," Stone said. "I'll stake my professional reputation on it."