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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.

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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.

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Posted on Sun, Aug. 28, 2005

New Orleans flees, braces, prays as monstrous Hurricane Katrina bears down

ALLEN G. BREED

Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS - "We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," Mayor Ray Nagin said in ordering the mandatory evacuation for his city of 485,000 people, surrounded by suburbs of a million more. "The storm surge will most likely topple our levee system." Conceding that as many as 100,000 inner-city residents didn't have the means to leave and an untold number of tourists were stranded by the closing of the airport, the city arranged buses to take people to 10 last-resort shelters, including the Superdome. Nagin also dispatched police and firefighters to rouse people out with sirens and bullhorns, and even gave them the authority to commandeer vehicles to aid in the evacuation. "This is very serious, of the highest nature," the mayor said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event." Hotels were spared from evacuation orders to give tourists and locals a place for "vertical evacuation."

Vertical evacuation high on risk -
Hotels urged not to take in guests during hurricanes
Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)
May 24, 2005
Author: Rebecca Mowbray
Business writer
Estimated printed pages: 5

In a hurricane symposium for hotel operators Monday afternoon at the Ritz Carlton New Orleans hotel, a battalion of public safety officials urged local hoteliers not to take guests during hurricanes because they won't be able to take care of them when the big storm hits.

"I don't encourage vertical evacuation," said Joseph Matthews, chief of the Office of Emergency Preparedness. "In New Orleans, let's face it, there are no safe havens."

But the reality is that for many years New Orleanians have evacuated vertically -- to local high-rise hotels -- rather than face the stress, uncertainty and hassle of trying to get out of town when hurricanes approach. The city does not open shelters; it opens refuges of last resort where people are responsible for their own food.

With the inventory of hotel rooms in the New Orleans area having grown to 38,000, there's greater capacity than ever before for people to try to stay.

Last year during Hurricane Ivan, for example, local hotels ran at 90 percent occupancy, often with three or four people to a room.

"One thing we know for a fact is that you're going to be full for a hurricane whether you want to be or not," said Bill Langkopp, executive vice president of the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association. "Vertical evacuation may not be policy, but it's reality."

This debate between safety and reality played out Monday afternoon as more than 100 hotel engineers, and safety and operations specialists gathered to talk about what they learned from the near miss of Hurricane Ivan last fall and how they can make things safer next time.

"We weren't prepared for the hurricane that hit," said Kitty Ratcliffe, who joined the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau as executive vice president after weathering last season's four hurricanes in Florida as head of the Jacksonville Convention and Visitors Bureau. "We want to make sure that we deal with this the right way should it occur again in 2005."

The convention bureau has developed a crisis management plan that it plans to give to all convention groups that meet in the city between July and October, and it is encouraging hotels to streamline their communications with each other when storms threaten so they can work together to make everyone safe.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that this year there will be 12 to 15 tropical storms, seven to nine hurricanes and three to five hurricanes that are at least a Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, or storms with winds of 111 mph to 130 mph.

"All the indications are there. It's going to be a very active season," said David Bernard, a WWL-TV meteorologist and speaker at the event. Bernard spoke about how to read hurricane strike predictions and noted that though scientists have gotten better at tracking storms, they still can't predict how strong storms will be when they make landfall.

But public safety officials said they hope there won't be many people that stay in hotels next time, and they painted a dire picture of why they shouldn't.

Local hotels may be strong enough to withstand hurricanes, even though many were built before building codes required them to endure 130 mph winds. But hotel windows, and the frames that hold the windows, may not be able to withstand a hurricane. And upper floors of hotels face stronger winds than lower floors, making high-rises potentially dangerous places to be.

Moreover, if the big one does hit, public safety officials said, hotels might find themselves taking care of guests for a few months rather than a few days, which would require having appropriate amounts of food, water and diesel fuel for generators on hand.

Fire danger also increases during storms because people often try to use candles instead of flashlights. If the city floods, firefighters expect the city to be filled with hazardous waste, some of which could be flammable. Worse, because even the newest firetrucks can make it through only up to 31 inches of water and it's a losing battle to fight fires in winds above 40 mph, the New Orleans Fire Department won't be there to help if there's a problem, Superintendent Charles Parent said.

Public safety officials also rattled off a number of other things for hotel operators to consider. Do they have some sort of safety restraint in case police can't get there to arrest someone? Should they ban sales of alcohol during storms? Can they keep people inside so they won't get hit with flying debris?

"If you're going to house people in a vertical evacuation, you're taking on a tremendous responsibility. You may be housing them for months," said Gary Savelle, chief of the New Orleans Fire Department.

However, after reports that it took 10 hours to make the 80-mile trip to Baton Rouge during the peak of the Hurricane Ivan evacuation last year, it's easy to understand why people decide to stay in a hotel rather than hit the road.

But Matthews said public safety officials hope this year's improved contra-flow evacuation plan will make the decision to leave easier. To set the tone that evacuation is the only way to go, Matthews said the city plans to close schools and government earlier this year.

"We would like you to make it known that you will not take additional guests," said Matthews, who encouraged hoteliers to submit evacuation plans to his office. He also encouraged them to sign contracts with diesel fuel suppliers and bus companies for emergency services if they plan to stay open, or, better yet, try to partner with hotels north of Interstate 12 and get them to agree to take guests if a storm hits.

The hotel association said it can't tell its members to shut down and that if there are guests stranded in hotels, they have a duty to stay open. "I think our role would be to provide all of the information that we heard today so that management can make informed decisions when the time comes," Langkopp said.

But at least one hotel operator said he plans to discourage taking reservations during hurricanes.

Scott Dawson, general manager of the Hotel Inter-Continental, said hoteliers have long felt that it is a community service -- a duty, even -- to provide shelter during the storms. But after participating in Monday's hurricane discussion and one last week in Jefferson Parish, Dawson said he thinks it's not doing anyone any favors to attempt to take on that responsibility.

Whether or not to stay open is not a question of business, because hotels lose money by selling rooms during storms at moderate rates and trying to serve so many people around the clock, Dawson said. It's a question of responsibility to employees and guests.

Next hurricane, Dawson said he thinks he will try to encourage guests and employees to leave, discourage reservations from the community and only take them if people are really stuck as the storm is bearing down on the area.

"You listen to these guys and you start to wonder if this is a wise course of action" to take guests, Dawson said. "It's about what is responsible. I think it's responsible to have as few people remain in the city as possible. Fundamentally, you want to have the hotel empty, because that means that everyone is somewhere else."

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RTA buses would be used for evacuation -
But plan still falls far short of needs
Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)
July 8, 2005
Author: Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
Estimated printed pages: 2

New Orleans has plans to deploy scores of buses from the Regional Transit Authority to evacuate people without transportation if Hurricane Dennis threatens the city, City Hall said on Thursday.

Such an effort would be both unprecedented and, apparently, far short of the city's needs.

At the same time, it appears emergency planners' efforts to establish church-led private transportation networks have fallen flat.

Surveys of the city's largest churches and of the Archdiocese of New Orleans indicated Thursday that most have no plans to gather church members or others and move them out of town in church vans or buses.

But the Archdiocese of New Orleans said it would evacuate the residents of its nursing homes and other health facilities.

Emergency planners may announce today whether they will trigger the RTA evacuation. That will depend on the course and location of Dennis, said Tami Frazier, spokeswoman for Mayor Ray Nagin.

The city assumes residents will look first to family and friends for rides out of the city, she said.

If events warrant evacuation, the Regional Transit Authority will contribute part of its 364-bus fleet to an effort that will end at undisclosed shelters north of Lake Pontchartrain, RTA spokeswoman Rosalind Cook said.

Not all the buses will be available, she cautioned. "We might be talking about as many as 100," she said.

The agency would hold much of its fleet back to continue operating on city streets until forced to shut down by a city curfew. The number of evacuation buses is further limited by the number of volunteer drivers who sign up to drive them away, she said.

Even if the entire fleet was used, the buses would carry only about 22,000 people out of the city -- far short of the 134,000 people estimated to be without cars in a recent University of New Orleans study.

In past years planners have talked about recruiting churches and their small private fleets into an evacuation effort. The idea, called Operation Brother's Keeper, has largely withered in the face of the complexity of the details, said Kay Wilkins, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross.

The state Legislature last year killed a bill to give immunity from liability to any person or organization providing free transportation during an emergency, except in cases of gross negligence. Critics of the bill said volunteers could be covered by insurance and questioned whether the proposal would be constitutional.

The Rev. William Maestri, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, said some church parishes may be mounting local evacuation efforts, but those would be announced through parish communication outlets.

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