Brownie Doesn’t Even Bother With Understanding the Louisiana Evacuation Plan

The essential order of an evacuation is layed out on the map for evacuations

During a threat of a hurricane, a phased evacuation will be based on geographic location and time in which tropical storm winds are forecasted to reach the affected areas.

Phased evacuation procedures are for traffic management purposes only. Consult your local Office of Emergency Preparedness Director for further evacuation information.

Phase I – 50 Hours before onset of tropical storm winds. Includes areas south of the Intracoastal Waterway. These areas are outside any levee protection system and are vulnerable to Category 1 and 2 storms. These areas are depicted in RED on the Evacuation Map. During Phase I there are no route restrictions.

Phase II – 40 Hours before onset of tropical storm winds. Includes areas south of the Mississippi River which are levee protected but remain vulnerable to Category 2 or higher storms. These areas are depicted in on the Evacuation Map. During Phase II there are no route restrictions.

Phase III – 30 Hours before onset of tropical storm winds. Includes areas on the East Bank of the Mississippi River in the New Orleans Metropolitan Area which are within the levee protection system but remain vulnerable to a slow-moving Category 3 or any Category 4 or 5 storm. These areas are depicted in YELLOW on the Evacuation Map. During Phase III, certain routes will be directed and the Contraflow Plan

Brown complains that no one would order the mandatory evacuation, but he misses the importance of these phases from past events like Ivan.

My mistake was in recognizing that for whatever reason that we might want to discuss later, but for whatever reason, Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were reticent to order a mandatory evacuation. And if I, Mike Brown individual, could have done something to convince them that this was the big one, and they needed to order a mandatory evacuation,

The thing is that the expected time for landfall was around 10 AM on Monday for most of the planning period. It came in four hours early. Tropical storm winds hit the City of New Orleans around 4 AM from what I’ve seen. Move that to 8 AM as the expected start of tropical storm force winds for the beginning of the process.

50 hours out starts evacuations of areas not protected at what would have been 6 AM on Saturday and we see that many of those areas were ordering those within a couple hours. The storm was only forecast to hit Louisiana with some likelihood in the late afternoon Friday–though not for certain. At 5 PM on Friday, Blanco announced a State of Emergency. So they were late by about 3 hours, but given the time of day, that probably is pretty irrelevant and any earlier had the real potential to be a false alarm

At 40 hours out, which would have been mid-afternoon Saturday places like Placquemines and St. Bernard should have been ordering evacuations. These had to start before Contraflow to avoid disruptions to traffic coming from those areas. Contraflow was begun at 4 PM on Saturday along with a call within that hour for evacuations from New Orleans that were voluntary.

New Orleans and Jefferson were supposed to wait some time before issuing mandatory evacuations because they would stop other traffic from getting out. So they are supposed to wait until 30 hours out. Jefferson essentially made that a bit early, but no one was complaining. Nagin essentially said it was a mandatory evacuation, but he didn’t think he could enforce it (stupid, but still made the point). That gave him until about 2 AM Sunday to make the order according to the timeline. He did the next morning at 9 AM. I think most would say he should have called it early in this case, but he was close to what the plan called for given waking hours.

Brown apparently was completely clueless about a plan developed with FEMA for exactly this kind of scenario. One of the reasons the evacuation from New Orleans didn’t look like Houston’s highways is that they hadn’t gotten Contraflow plans down very well after a debacle with Ivan. Without the sequencing the system doesn’t work.

The local officials other than Nagin on the Mandatory portion pretty much hit their timelines and got those out who would leave and had the means to leave in a remarkably efficient manor compared to Houston exactly because they called the evacuations as the did.

The exception is Nagin who made it pretty clear that people needed to get on the road as Contraflow opened up.

The resulting 80% that likely evacuated was the highest ever obtained by the City and to make matters worse for Brown’s point-of-view–he should have expected to have to move more people out by bus than he did.

He is utterly clueless to this day about his responsibilities and that of the federal government and about the local planning. This isn’t to say the local plan was adequate or that state and local officials didn’t make serious mistakes. I have pointed out Blanco’s mistakes with the National Guard, and I’ve now mentioned Nagin’s dithering on ordering a mandatory evacuation. All that said, the state and local authorities largely followed the plans developed between state, local and federal bodies. The Federal Government led by Brown denied the existence of those plans and apparently still doesn’t realize the grave errors made.