Nix Bits

This post from another blog hits the nail on the head. Some of the political squabbling and national news media coverage has been infuriating. There’s been little in the way of context or perspective in most of it. There’s plenty of blame to go around for the failures post-Katrina but there’s been no discussion of what went right. Make sure you read the comments too.

When I hear the talking heads lambaste local officials for not sounding the alarm early enough, I want to hit one of them. For the entire 48 hours before the storm, there was nothing else on the local TV and radio but Katrina. Even before they made evacuations “mandatory” things were discussed in dire terms. On Saturday, this storm was described as “a life changing event”. Residents who chose not to evacuate at that point were already being advised to have a hatchet or axe handy to hack through their roofs. This wasn’t just local news media saying these things, it was the local officials. From Saturday morning on we were urged in the strongest terms to get out of town.

Contraflow was enacted on Saturday at 3pm, an hour earlier than we were told it would be. It was made abundantly clear that the terms “voluntary” and “mandatory” evacuation were designations with particular legal ramifications. It didn’t matter what the evacuation was called technically, it only mattered that we board up, pack up, and get away. The advice only got more dire on Sunday when the technicalities were sorted out and the Orleans parish evacuation was deemed “mandatory”. It’s not often you hear a state governor telling people who choose to ignore the evacuation order to write the social security numbers on their arms so they can be identified later.

I should also note that calling the Orleans Parish evacuation mandatory “late” on Sunday morning, roughly 21 hours before landfall, was in keeping with the staggered evacuation plan that had evolved out of the painful Georges and Ivan events. Low lying areas were evacuated first and Orleans and East Jefferson last. It would have been called for sooner in keeping with the state plan’s timeline, but they couldn’t make the evacuation order at 4 in the morning. My guess is they wanted people to actually hear it. I should also note that the storm both sped up and enlarged, cutting the planned evacuation time that much shorter.

As the Gulfsails blog points out, getting 80% of the Greater New Orleans area population out in roughly 48 hours is rather amazing (the 80% figure is a current common estimate). Especially when you consider the small number of routes out and the minimum distance we had to travel to get “safe”. Watching the Houston/Galveston evacuation — without any contraflow or staggering in place — there’s plenty to learn from Louisiana about what we did right as well as what we did wrong.