Posted on 09/13/2005 4:12:42 PM PDT by LA Woman3
NEW ORLEANS — After years of warnings, community leaders this summer prepared a video guide to hurricane evacuations with a stark message: Many of this city's poor, including 134,000 without cars, could be left behind in a killer storm. But the 30-minute DVD still has not arrived. Some 70,000 of the newly minted videos that were to be released this month remain on warehouse shelves in Los Angeles. ADVERTISEMENT Their warning: Save yourself, and help your neighbors if you can. "Don't wait for the city, don't wait for the state, don't wait for the Red Cross," the Rev. Marshall Truehill warns in the public service announcement. The program, titled "Preparing for the Big One," was one of several related but incomplete plans aimed in particular at the one-quarter of the city's population that did not own cars or have ready transportation out of town in the event of evacuation orders.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
But they did.
Oh,sorry....
I forgot my sarcasm tag. Why is this DVD in a warehouse in California? And how many poor people have DVD players?
And how many poor people have DVD players? - a lot more than before the looting.
So, it's not BUSH'S fault, it's ARNIE'S fault. AHA......
LOL.
And new big screen plasma TV's view them on.
Maybe they were waiting for the DVD player and wide screen tv subsidies to kick in.
It's 'Bush's Fault' if they didn't have one.
I'm not sure what they would be surfing the net to find....choice dumpsters for diving into? ...best heated sidewalk grates to sleep on? ...best panhandling sites?
...remain on warehouse shelves in Los Angeles.
I hope that they were written on DVD-RW. Since NO is out of cash, of course that may be why they were still on the shelves, they haven't been paid for.
And the insanity continues....
The program also features advise on how to clear storm drains
The LA Times says advice was given on clearing storm drains; why no advice on clearing barges that were knocking a hole or two in a levy? Given the lack of attention to such flood control these past 40 years, doesn't that fall under the "you are on your own" umbrella as well?
In storm, N.O. wants no one left behind -
Number of people without cars makes evacuation difficult
Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)
July 24, 2005
Author: Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
Estimated printed pages: 4
City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own.
In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.
In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation.
"You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," Wilkins said in an interview. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you.
"But we don't have the transportation."
Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane.
Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs' basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but the it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action.
"The primary message is that each person is primarily responsible for themselves, for their own family and friends," Truehill said.
In addition to the plea from Nagin, Thomas and Wilkins, video exhortations to make evacuation plans come from representatives of State Police and the National Weather Service, and from local officials such as Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, and State Rep. Arthur Morrell, D-New Orleans, said Allan Katz, whose advertising company is coordinating officials' scripts and doing the recording.
The speakers explain what to bring and what to leave behind. They advise viewers to bring personal medicines and critical legal documents, and tell them how to create a family communication plan. Even a representative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals weighs in with a message on how to make the best arrangements for pets left behind.
Production likely will continue through August. Officials want to get the DVDs into the hands of pastors and community leaders as hurricane season reaches its height in September, Katz said.
Fleeing the storm
Believing that the low-lying city is too dangerous a place to shelter refugees, the Red Cross positioned its storm shelters on higher ground north of Interstate 10 several years ago. It dropped plans to care for storm victims in schools or other institutions in town.
Truehill, Wilkins and others said emergency preparedness officials still plan to deploy some Regional Transit Authority buses, school buses and perhaps even Amtrak trains to move some people before a storm.
An RTA emergency plan dedicates 64 buses and 10 lift vans to move people somewhere; whether that means out of town or to local shelters of last resort would depend on emergency planners' decision at that moment, RTA spokeswoman Rosalind Cook said.
But even the larger buses hold only about 60 people each, a rescue capacity that is dwarfed by the unmet need.
In an interview at the opening of this year's hurricane season, New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Director Joseph Matthews acknowledged that the city is overmatched.
"It's important to emphasize that we just don't have the resources to take everybody out," he said in a interview in late May.
A helping hand
In the absence of public transportation resources, Total Community Action and the Red Cross have been developing a private initiative called Operation Brother's Keeper that, fully formed, would enlist churches in a vast, decentralized effort to make space for the poor and the infirm in church members' cars when they evacuate.
However, the program is only in the first year of a three-year experiment and involves only four local churches so far.
The Red Cross and Total Community Action are trying to invent a program that would show churches how to inventory their members, match those with space in their cars with those needing a ride, and put all the information in a useful framework, Wilkins said.
But the complexities so far are daunting, she said.
The inventories go only at the pace of the volunteers doing them. Where churches recruit partner churches out of the storm area to shelter them, volunteers in both places need to be trained in running shelters, she said.
People also have to think carefully about what makes good evacuation matches. Wilkins said that when ride arrangements are made, the volunteers must be sure to tell their passengers where their planned destination is if they are evacuated.
Moreover, although the Archdiocese of New Orleans has endorsed the project in principle, it doesn't want its 142 parishes to participate until insurance problems have been solved with new legislation that reduces liability risks, Wilkins said.
At the end of three years, organizers of Operation Brother's Keeper hope to have trained 90 congregations how to develop evacuation plans for their own members.
The church connection
Meanwhile, some churches appear to have moved on their own to create evacuation plans that assist members without cars.
Since the Hurricane Ivan evacuation of 2004, Mormon churches have begun matching members who have empty seats in cars with those needing seats, said Scott Conlin, president of the church's local stake. Eleven local congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints share a common evacuation plan, and many church members have three-day emergency kits packed and ready to go, he said.
Mormon churches in Jackson, Miss., Hattiesburg, Miss., and Alexandria, La., have arranged to receive evacuees. The denomination also maintains a toll-free telephone number that functions as a central information drop, where members on the road can leave information about their whereabouts that church leaders can pick up and relay as necessary, Conlin said.
http://www.nola.com
Of course, each show led with what the Fed's did wrong, detailing overblown minutia and broad generalities all in the same breath.
Then they went on to focus their attention to how the state and local goverments may have failed in their response.
It pretty much went like this..........
Now we'll focus our attention to the state and local response. blah blah blah blah......but most still feel that it was the Feds that bare the responsibility for the failure.........while the local and state gov'ts didn't blah blah blah blah, the Feds still appear to be the most culpable for what went wrong.
They crack me up!
Wait, they're poor. How could they watch DVDs?
Saving the stranded
Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)
July 9, 2005
Estimated printed pages: 1
A plan to move people out of New Orleans on Regional Transit Authority buses may not be tested by Hurricane Dennis, since as of late Friday no evacuations have been ordered in preparation for the storm.
But if the plan were implemented -- and implemented perfectly -- it would fall short of the need. At best, the RTA fleet can only move 22,000 people out of harm's way, but 134,000 people in New Orleans lack personal transportation, according to a University of New Orleans study.
City officials assume that people will seek rides from friends and family first. But the gap that needs to be filled is large, and emergency planners had hoped that churches would help by using their vans and buses to evacuate members of their congregations who don't have cars. Unfortunately, though, Operation Brother's Keeper has not caught on.
Kay Wilkins, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, said the idea has languished because of the complex details involved in such an operation.
But given the enormity of the need, the logistics seem like a burden that is worth shouldering. Churches and nonprofits that have the resources ought to consider playing such a role in the future.
http://www.nola.com
bare s/b bear
PREPARING FOR THE WORST -
Officials rework evacuation strategy
Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)
May 31, 2005
Author: Mark Schleifstein
Staff writer
Estimated printed pages: 5
With the six-month hurricane season opening Wednesday, local emergency planners are fine-tuning evacuation plans, including changes to last year's rage-inducing scheme to use both sides of the interstate and a new effort to bus thousands of people without personal transportation out of New Orleans.
And with another busy season predicted, national hurricane experts say they will release more information this year, partly because they're hoping to encourage evacuation or precautions sooner, and partly because they'll have more data from a new automated reporting system throughout the Gulf of Mexico.
"I can't emphasize enough how concerned I am with southeast Louisiana because of its unique characteristics, its complex levee system," National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield said. "I know I've said this before, but the potential for a large loss of life from a hurricane is greater in southeast Louisiana than anywhere else on the Gulf Coast."
The local changes are meant to improve on a less-than-satisfactory evacuation response across the New Orleans area last year when a powerful Hurricane Ivan was bearing down on the city. It swerved and crashed ashore at the Alabama-Florida border, wiping away homes and condominiums and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, some of which still hasn't been repaired.
In what ended up being a frustrating move last year for emergency planners and evacuees alike, drivers were allowed to use both sides of Interstate 10 to go west. But a number of glitches conspired to make the 90-mile drive to Baton Rouge take up to 10 hours. At times, Ivan was moving faster than traffic on the interstate.
Under this year's plan, the number of lanes on major traffic arteries out of the New Orleans area will increase from eight to 11. All lanes of Interstate 10 in East Jefferson will go westbound beginning at Clearview Parkway in Metairie, instead of at Loyola Drive in Kenner five miles farther west. Most westbound travel on Interstate 12 in St. Tammany Parish will be prohibited. To the north of I-12, all lanes of I-55 and I-59 will carry evacuees north into Mississippi.
In addition, state workers will restripe the northbound I-10 bridge from Irish Bayou to Slidell so evacuees will have three outbound lanes across Lake Pontchartrain.
Evacuees will need to plan ahead, because where they enter the interstate and which bridge they use will determine where they end up.
The plan calls for a four-phase evacuation beginning 50 hours before tropical storm-force winds are expected to hit the Louisiana coast. First out would be residents south of the Intracoastal Waterway, including residents of the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans and the east bank of the Mississippi River in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. At 40 hours, the West Bank would be evacuated. At 30 hours, contraflow restrictions will kick in and the east bank of New Orleans and East Jefferson would be urged to evacuate. Contraflow would end six hours before the storm makes landfall.
Maps showing the details of the contraflow plan should be issued by the state in June, officials said.
Busing planned
The busing evacuation plan is a work in progress. Details likely will remain murky until time to implement the plan, because officials don't want people heading to a particular place expecting a ride. Those without transportation need to be planning now how they'll get to safety, New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Director Joseph Matthews said.
"It's important to emphasize that we just don't have the resources to take everybody out," Matthews said.
He said the viability of the bus plan depends on whether Regional Transit Authority and New Orleans public school officials find enough volunteer drivers.
New Orleans is in an unusual situation, compared with neighboring parishes, because more than a quarter of its residents have no personal transportation. According to the most recent census data, about 134,000 out of the city's 480,000 people are without cars, said Shirley Laska, director of the University of New Orleans' Center for Hazards Assessment, Response & Technology.
If the buses are used, Matthews said those on board will have to be patient.
"Lets face it," he said. "In time of an emergency, if we wait until the new contraflow plan is put in effect to begin this plan, it will take anywhere from four to six hours to get people as far as Baton Rouge.
"And we have to arrange for things as simple as finding strategic points along the route for bathrooms and water, for security and medical personnel to accompany the convoy in case of medical needs."
Matthews said the plan is to take people from 10 pickup points throughout the city to one or more shelters north of Interstate 12.
City officials also are cooperating with the American Red Cross, Total Community Action and the University of New Orleans in developing a faith-based hurricane response system that includes a buddy system for evacuation.
Operation Brother's Keeper, financed with a grant from the Baptist Community Ministries, is aimed at assisting religious institutions in both preparing for a hurricane and in finding ways to pair with other religious institutions north of the lake to provide transportation and shelter.
There are four pilot churches this year, with a goal of providing assistance to about 2,000 residents.
Red Cross officials recommend that families put together emergency kits including personal financial information, flashlights, first-aid kits, medicines and other supplies, which can be used during evacuations or during other non-hurricane emergencies.
Stormy weather
The National Hurricane Center predicted this month there would be 12 to 15 tropical storms this season, with seven to nine becoming hurricanes and three to five becoming major hurricanes.
Mayfield, the Hurricane Center's director, said a new experimental forecasting product being rolled out by the center this year should help emergency preparedness officials in making decisions on evacuations.
The center will publish a map and a written statement with the probability of 35 mph, 58 mph and 75 mph or greater winds occuring in areas along a storm's forecast path.
"Emergency managers can take the product and go to their local officials and say there's a 20 percent probability of being hit by hurricane-force winds, and that might be enough to convince them to take action," Mayfield said.
Such products are usually tested for a year or two before being made a permanent part of the national hurricane forecasting array, he said.
Local National Weather Service forecast offices also will be issuing local inland hurricane statements and will place more emphasis on them, Mayfield said.
That effort is aimed at getting people in shoreline areas, such as along Florida's coast, to evacuate to the closest inland location available to avoid inland flooding, he said.
Hurricane researchers and emergency preparedness officials also could begin benefiting this year from a growing national and worldwide observing system, which includes buoys and other observation points in the Gulf of Mexico and along the coast.
Speaking at the American Geophysical Union's Joint Assembly last week, a gathering of four international earth and space science organizations, Landry Bernard of the National Data Buoy Center at Stennis Space Center said efforts are under way to create a $30 million-a-year observation program in the Gulf by 2011.
Information from the beginnings of that system already has helped researchers understand how a combination of storm surge and wind-driven waves damaged or destroyed stretches of Interstate 10 bridges over Alabama's Mobile Bay and Florida's Pensacola Bay during Hurricane Ivan last year.
Several decks were knocked off their piers by a surge of 12 feet combined with locally generated waves of 6 ½ feet to 10 feet, said Jim Chen, a researcher with the Coastal Transportation Engineering Research and Education Center at the University of South Alabama.
Such information is expected to be useful in designing improvements to bridges all along I-10 in the Gulf region, he said.
New data also will be available this year about the underwater effects of hurricanes that pass across offshore oil rigs, thanks to new Minerals Management Service rules.
The federal agency, which regulates oil production in federal waters, now requires each platform to measure underwater currents from a few feet below the surface to a rig's bottom, and to report it every 20 minutes to the buoy center at Stennis, said Don Conlee, who runs the collection program.
He said there already are 20 companies participating in the new database. The information will be available for a variety of users, including the National Hurricane Center, which could use it in hurricane prediction models.
http://www.nola.com
Why couldn't the contents of the DVD have been played over the air on the broadcast stations in New Orleans in the days before Katrina hit.
Kay Wilkins, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, said the idea has languished because of the complex details involved in such an operation.
So that is when the "It will turn" plan kicked in???
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