[Vision2020] Of Deltas and CO2

[Phil Nisbet]

Andreas

You might find this a tad amusing.

http://www.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=46&tabid=4

Every City is required to have an emergency Preparedness and Response Plan 
and New Orleans actually did have one, which was assisted by the Office of 
Homeland Security with funding.

If you realize that the idea presented by the Mayor was for handicapped 
people to pick a buddy and ask that buddy to evacuate them or if they could 
not to have contacted the New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness in 
advance to arrange for transportation to the last resort centers, you get a 
flavor for how fouled up the system there was.  The Mayor shut down public 
transit after he called for evacuation and in his plan; he had called for 
these people to sit tight in the centers of their homes.  Then he tells them 
to evacuate, but does not send any transport for them to do so.

Reading the documents from before the disaster is like reading the 
instructions on putting your head between your knees prior to a Nuke strike; 
so that you can kiss you’re a-s goodbye.

The City of New Orleans had one of the best public transit systems in the 
Region, yet prior to the passage of the hurricane and well before the flood 
waters rolled into the city, that resource was grounded.  The mayor issued a 
proclamation for people to flee, but did not bother to insure that there was 
any public transit in a city that relies on it for the people in low laying 
areas.  The poor, who relied most heavily on public transit, were left 
stranded on the lowest of ground to fend for themselves.

Couple that with the fact that the Mayor had not even bothered to 
pre-position food and water in the very areas he had previously dedicated 
for last resort shelters.  What you have at that point is a recipe for 
magnifying what was already going to be a bad experience into being a true 
nightmare.

What should have played out?

The Mayor and the Governor should have proclaimed the Emergency when they 
knew that the hurricane was heading in.  They did not because they hoped, as 
most places do, that it would hit someplace else and that proclaiming it was 
going to cost them budget.  They crossed their fingers and hoped that the 
storm would turn, which it did, but the glancing blow was enough to cause 
major damage.

Once they knew that the storm was as big as it was and that evacuation was 
called for, the Mayor should have had those buses from the Transit Authority 
down in the low areas getting as many people out as possible.  He should 
have at the same time, while the roads were completely passable, sent as 
much food and water as he could to the areas he had designated as last 
resort centers.  Once the flooding started, there was no way to get people 
out and no way to get a lot of supplies easily to the places they were 
needed.

FEMA and the Office of Homeland Security should have reviewed the 
Preparedness documents of the City of New Orleans much more critically and 
insisted that they be corrected.  Politically that would have been hard, 
since it would have seemed like the bad old Feds were stomping on Democrats 
in Louisiana, but their failure to push the City of New Orleans in the right 
direction can be plainly seen.

I would ask you, in similar circumstances, would Mayor Comstock not think to 
get buses to get everybody out of Moscow?  And if he failed to do so, do you 
think that the rest of our public officials would not be right on top of it, 
insisting that literally everybody got out in an evacuation?  It would not 
take FEMA showing up with black helicopters to get every man woman and child 
moved from here to safety.

Phil Nisbet

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