Nix Bits

So Jennifer and I have been sick the last few days up here in Madison and not sleeping so great. We woke up Saturday not long after Rita made landfall and flipped on the TV. Of course they had the usual shots of reports standing out in the wind and rain trying to impress us with their macho heroics and scenes of signs and lightpoles bending and crashing.

Then anchors Tony Green and Catherine Calloway are interviewing Rep Gene Green of Texas and Tony decides to veer off the script a bit:

HARRIS: Representative Green, all right, let me go off the beaten path for a second. Evacuation drills, why not institute as a civil exercise — you just mentioned that we learned something from all of these storms. Why not find out ahead of time if our evacuation plans will actually work? Why not institute an evacuation drill? We give everybody a half a day off or whatever is necessary and we try the plan out?

GREEN: If we have any more storms like we’ve had in Katrina in Louisiana and this one, you’re right, we need to. You know, our EMS personnel and our emergency services folks war gamed this, but they don’t typically get the people involved, our constituents. But, if we continue to have these storms, I don’t know if we need to have a drill. We’re going through the drill in real life, seems like, the last three weeks in Louisiana and Texas.

Jennifer and I never even heard Gene’s answer we were giggling so hard. Tony made this goofy face at the end of the question as if in speaking it aloud, he suddenly realized how rediculous this was.

We laughed a good bit at the notion of everyone just leaving work one day and driving to Dallas for no reason other than seeing how it works.

Actually, as Rep Green pointed out, there’s no need for drills. While LA didn’t do such a good job of getting folks out who didn’t own cars, the “contraflow” evacuation for those that did have means of transport worked better than it had in the past. We generally didn’t have those scenes of misery on the highway. We had already done it during Georges in ’98, and Ivan last year and worked out some of the kinks. I’m not saying that nine hours to Jackson was pretty, but it was within the realm of reasonable expectations.

The inane questions some of these goons ask kills me. I’m getting tired of hearing these guys try to foment controversy by asking if Nagin’s plan to repopulate the city is at odds with the National Guard and FEMA. Earth to moron journalists: Our homes were flooded. It’s been a month since most of us have seen them. We’d like to get in, assess the damage, deal with our insurers, and salvage what little we can. We’re not talking about moving back in tomorrow.

linkage:

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0509/24/bn.05.html Full CNN transcript for the above.
How New
Orleans’ Evacuation Plan Fell Apart Excellent analysis of the evacuation we heard on NPR the other day.