who do you hold responsible?

[sarettah]

Originally Posted by Carrie

As for this being preventable, I think the only way to universally plan for that is to *force* people out of their homes and onto buses and evacuate them whether they want to go or not. If the city were empty of people right now, this would be a much better situation.

That is what a "MANDATORY" evacuation is. You don't just say "you have to get out", you make sure they are out.

The only evacuation plan I saw in action throughout this was to tell people to go. Some of those people spent 9 or 10 hours and only managed to get 90 miles down the road. Airlines, that could have been flying all the way into Sunday evening had canceled flights Sunday morning leaving travelers stranded.

That is piss poor planning on the part of whoever came up with the evacuation plan.

The "plan" also did not take into account those without transportation. If you are in an urban area, you have a good many folks that do not have cars. If you do a mandatory evacuation, you have to take into account that you might be busing a whole lot of people out. The plan did not include "ordering" the airlines to keep flying folks out of there. If you are a tourist area, then you know that you need to take into account the fact that many folks will be relying on air flight.

Then the putting folks in the superdome thing. Dammit. That was obviously a last minute call as evidenced by the lack of food, etc.

The Feds labeled it a federal disaster BEFORE the storm hit.
The media were calling for a worst case scenario from the word go.

Since they knew they had a disaster going into it, they should have had stuff staged and ready to go. They didn't !

It is obvious that there was no real plan. The only plan was "ok, evacuate, everyone will leave..."