It was Ivan. Below are several articles on how Louisiana and the City of New Orleans coped with the lessons learned from Ivan and the evacuation.
There are several striking things in the material–just go back a few posts to see the full articles over the last year.
One is that the City was acutely aware of the problem of evacing the poor and others who couldn’t get out, but didn’t have the resources to do it. Even with the claims on Drudge, the reality is the City didn’t have 200 bus drivers to volunteer to drive them. The young man who comandeered a school bus was great, but imagine just grabbing two hundred drivers and sending them in heavy traffic to evacuate–the number of problems involving accidents would only make a difficult evacuation harder. City resources were focused on securing the city and moving people within the city to shelters including the Superdome. An action that save innumerable lives.
During Ivan, only 1200 people showed up at the Superdome. Since Ivan, the City improved it’s plan and had city buses run routes for people without cars to places where other special bus routes ran people to shelters. This time, 20-30,000 people got there. If there was a mistake, it was not designating another shelter of last resort–such as the Convention Center (this would have helped additionally because there would have been some real security planned).
The State and the City were acutely aware that a Mandatory evacuation would still leave at least 100,000 behind. There simply is no infrastructure to solve that problem anywhere in the nation. Knowing that, the City was working to make the Superdome retrofitted in its rehab to provide exactly the kind of improvements that would have alleviated the suffering–power sources and sewage modifications.
Overall though, those who vote have their concerns most addressed and in Ivan’s case the contraflow system was very poorly managed. The State fixed that plan and those with the means to leave certainly had a lot of traffic to deal with, but it moved relatively fast other than the Mississippi border which was a whole other problem.
Those who vote are those people who could evacuate and politicians responded. What’s stunning is that even in the case of the worst off, the City of New Orleans still worked to improve the shelter intake and provision system to give a last resort.
What is unbelievable is the federal government didn’t have a contingency for evacuating those left in the City after the storm. The problem was known and the City did what it could do to alleviate those concerns and in the long term had plans to alleviate the problems even further. Katrina beat them to it though.
There are going to be thousands of mistakes to identify and problems to identify over the next few years. Everyone in the situation make some understandable mistakes given the breadth of the crisis. Some of those mistaked are not understandable and at a minimum we are seeing a flood of bullshit out of Mike Brown’s mouth that seriously questions whether he is in touch with reality. Replace him now–put Honore in charge so you lose no continuity and then deal with other problems later.
ArchPundit