Yes, the city leaders were incompetent.
Three days before Katrina hit and the levees failed, Katrina was a small storm in the Gulf with a cone of probability reaching from Texas to the
SW coast of Florida.
And the bottom line is that those people who did not evacuate, did not want to evacuate.
Yep.
And I know someone who evacuated New Orleans on the Friday before the storm on Sunday (to Houston).
As there was getting to be more certainty of hitting New Orleans, some still adamantly refused to leave. Even their friends didn't know for several days if they'd survived.
"In a press conference at roughly (Sun Aug 28) 10:00 AM CDT, Nagin declared that 'a mandatory evacuation order is hereby called for all of the parish of Orleans.'"