have browser, will travel Jim Roepcke's weblog, since 1999

Re: Mayor Nagin is pissed, so am I

After work I decided to check on Irish Trojan again. I wasn't surprised to see yet another post blaming NOLA Mayor Nagin for screwing up the evacuation process last weekend.

He pointed to this page on JunkYardBlog which puts it pretty plainly... there were hundreds of buses available in New Orleans to evacuate people over the weekend.

So I'm about to post that link on my weblog when I noticed Brian Carnell had replied to my previous post saying essentially the same thing. Maybe he saw the same story I just did?

I totally agree that those buses could have and should have been used. But I think the logistics planning for an event like this was so poor that it wasn't even in the cards. Imagine Mayor Nagin says on Saturday morning or Saturday evening, "anyone who doesn't have a way out of town should make their way to the Superdome or the Convention Center or (INSERT THE NAMES OF A DOZEN PLACES PICKUPS COULD HAVE HAPPENED HERE)".

How many people would have come? How many people would have gotten that message? (If they had planned for it there would have been police or other officials in the city bullhorning the message in every neighbourhood) If people did respond en masse, would their have been chaos? Would it have affected the people trying to evacuate on their own? I think it would have been quite a challenge. Don't forget the roads out of New Orleans were already extremely congested.

I think cities need to have these things thought through and ready, and the public (including kids via their schools) need to be educated about these procedures. Like fire drills, but without actually going through with the packing of people on buses and taking them out of town. This way the populous will gradually learn where their evacuation assembly location is, and what to expect when they get there, and people who aren't using those services know how to avoid the crowds there.

How is it that a city in New Orlean's situation didn't have a plan like that ready? What was the plan? Obviously they knew they had a massive amount of people who had no way out. What was their plan for hospital residents? For the prisons? Everything has seemed rather ad-hoc. But is Mayor Nagin to blame for all of this? Surely some, as are lots of people, and that blame is going to be passed around for a long, long time. Mayor Nagin was elected in May 2002. Even if he'd made it his first priority from day one I'm not sure they could have done enough. I've read money tagged to improve the levees was diverted to funding the war in Iraq (but admittedly I have no concrete source for that, can someone confirm that?), so it's not like he wouldn't have been fighting an uphill battle.

Here in Victoria, it's popular belief that if the "Big One" hits (ie: a massive earthquake very close to Victoria), Victoria will be underwater from tsunami flooding. I don't know what the city's plan is for dealing with that, so even if they do have a plan they obviously aren't communicating it well enough.

Mayor Nagin is pissed, so am I

CNN.com: Mayor to feds: 'Get off your asses'

This is from a transcript of an interview with NOLA Mayor Nagin and WWL reporter Garland Robinette. There is audio available too. Brendan Loy is very critical of Mayor Nagin for not issuing the evacuation sooner, but I've heard counter-arguments that if he had made the evacuation mandatory on Saturday, it would have caused so much panic that the evacuation might have been even slower than it ended up being, and some people think too many would have believed it was crying wolf. How terrible must it be to be a mayor of a city in crisis and be essentially powerless.

Mayor Nagin also mentions that drug addiction is to blame for a majority of the worst problems in the city. He says the drugstores and hospitals have had looters because those addicts are looking for a fix.

I noticed earlier Apple finally has a SMALL link on the bottom left of their home page for donating to the Red Cross. When the tsunami hit asia last December, Apple very quickly replaced their huge main home page image with a link to the Red Cross. It's taken an entire work week for them to make a little version of that image? I guess their Mighty Mouse is more important.

I looked a couple of days ago and Microsoft had nothing on their home page. Just looked, they have a big link, right at the top of their content area.

This summer I went to SF for WWDC. We were bussed to Cupertino for the Beer Bash. I couldn't believe how many buses were required to get the people there... and probably only 2-3 thousand people. There are still tens of thousands of people in New Orleans that need transportation. Mayor Nagin is right, they really do need every bus they can find. At least it appears the people at the Convention Center have finally been brought some food and water (after days of going without).

How would you feel if it was your city in this situation and you've been waiting for help, neck deep in toxic water in your attic, since Sunday or Monday? Don't try to downplay the seriousness of this. I said it a couple of days ago and I'll say it again, we need to find out if our city officials have adequate disaster recovery plans. It's pretty clear from this situation that there's no guarantee they do.

Excellent sources of Katrina aftermath information

The best blogs I have found regarding New Orleans and Katrina so far are:

The Irish Trojan's blog - Brendan Loy's homepage

Brendan's blog has been amazing and the attention he's received is well-deserved. He had excellent coverage even before the hurricane hit, he taught me a lot about Hurricanes. I didn't know that Hurricanes have "eye replacement cycles" before I visited his site.

I think I found this site via Google doing some Hurricane searches on Saturday afternoon when I first heard Katrina was a threat to NOLA.

The people behind The Interdictor are an amazing story unto themselves. They are living in the datacenter they work at, in a 27 floor building IN NEW ORLEANS, because it's their job to keep the thing running. And they're taking that responsibility EXTREMELY seriously. They have a diesel generator powering the data center and at least part of their network backbone is still functioning. Amazing pictures and video there too. I pity any looter that makes the mistake of trying to mess with those guys.

Not so easy to send in more troops to New Orleans

Sorry if this is super obvious, and I'm just thick to have not realized it before, but it's not necessarily simple to send in thousands and thousands of extra troops to the New Orleans area.

I've read on other blogs that there are tens of thousands of National Guard in other states ready to mobilize when given the word, the response from those bloggers being "what the hell are you waiting for?"

That was my first reaction too. More troops are needed to regain control of the city so that rescues can proceed at maximum speed.

But where are all of those extra thousands of troops going to get drinking water from? Obviously they have the same problem in Iraq because drinking water is (or was last time I read about it) very scarce there too. I would also assume the military "has ways and means" to provide their troops with drinking water, but I'm guessing the military was so unprepared for a domestic event of this magnitude that there just aren't adequate supplies on hand to make this speedy.

The buildup to deployment in Iraq was a months-long procedure, not immediate.

So, assuming there are massive logistic issues preventing national guard from blanketing New Orleans, I can understand the delay... but if not, shame on the powers that be for dragging their feet.