pedramredhive.com
Date: Sun Sep 04 2005 - 02:14:42 CDT

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In my opinion the true failure occurred before the hurricane even hit. I spent
four years in New Orleans at Tulane University. Within my first week NOLA was
indirectly hit by a hurricane that caused feet of flooding in many areas. The
damage was obviously not nearly as bad as Katrina, the pumps were turned on and
the city was operational within a week and a half. The most interesting part of
the experience was witnessing the number of people that remained in the area,
endured the storm and boated around the city afterwards. While I lacked the
transportation to escape on short notice the majority of locals stayed on the
notion of "this isn't a big deal", "it'll miss us", and "we've taken bigger
ones before". Everyone who lives in NOLA fully understands the repercussions
associated with a levy breach. However, it seems that the large number of near
misses created a false confidence over time and instilled an evacuation
laziness.

The city should have done a better job making a big/critical deal out of
Katrina. Furthermore, in such dangerous areas adequate public transportation
should exist on standby to assist in the rapid evacuation of those without the
transportation means to evacuate on their own.

On another note. I'm very interested to see if the US accepts the very generous
$100 million donation offer from Qatar:

    http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.world.aid/index.html

-pedram

Quoting Rodney Thayer <rodneycanola-jones.com>:

> See the paper trail on all the money for flood control in Louisiana
> that's been diverted over the past several years. See Bush's
> not-always-positively-received reactions to the events.
>
> Yeah, a metric fsck-ton of water fell on the place and it makes
> it hard for anyone to deal, but we've been terraforming that part
> of the planet for 200 years and we seem to get that wrong sometimes.
>
> And I think people DO train urban rescue for flooding conditions. These
> hurricane things have been happening for a while.
>
> Ron Gula wrote:
> > At 10:50 AM 9/2/2005, Rodney Thayer wrote:
> >
> >> It's times like this I hate the fact that it appears we have some
> >> legitimate
> >> reason to be embarassed in front of our European collegues
> >> about our federal government's incompetence at disaster management.
> >> One tries not to imagine what they'll do if confronted with a "digital
> >> Pearl Harbor".
> >
> >
> > Really? I'm sure things could have been done better here, but we
> > have 50,000+ people in the area, hundreds of thousands trying to
> > get out and no roads. When was the last time any major superpower
> > had to evacuate a whole city in just a few days, and then contend
> > with no roads and flooding.
> >
> > There are lots of positive examples of things that did work, like
> > the fact that a large amount of the population made it out before
> > the bad weather hit. Things like showers and hot meals in the
> > Houston stadium just 1-2 days after things hit are also amazing.
> >
> > Lastly, no-one trains urban rescue in 3-4' of flood water. I think
> > if you take any well trained response force from anywhere in the
> > world and put them in NO right now, they would be having similar
> > issues.
> >
> > Ron Gula
> >

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