Katrina actually hit MS much harder than LA. New Orleans was really only side-swiped. I remember TV early next morning talking about how NO had dodged another bullet and showing video of high-rise hotels with only a few broken windows.
NO was not really hit by a hurricane. It was flooded. The levees broke, with most of the breaks being well below the levels they were supposed to withstand. There was remarkably little wind damage in the city.
Yet, we heard almost NOTHING about MS. It was all whining about NO. What a disservice to those heroic men and women who prepared and cleaned up for themselves without all the whining and looking for handouts.
They got on with their lives. There’s still NO “victims” (and I use the term loosely) who are still living on govt. handouts.
It makes me sick.
Apples and oranges. The storm hit the MS coast harder, both in wind strength and storm surge -- but those were relatively sparsely-populated areas, where nearly everyone had cars and most had access to a truck, so it was easier to et out of Dodge.
The vast majority of the damage to NOLA was not from the storm, but from the collapse of the levees. It flooded an urban core with a well-established mass transit system, Lots of people without cars. The Lower ninth Ward was simply not the same kind of place as Bay St. Louis or Pass Christien.
That is not to excuse the local authorities from responsibility. The challenges in New Orleans were something that NOLA should have known about and prepared for. All those school buses, which were destroyed at a cost of millions and could have saved the lives of thousands, should have been pressed into service -- most of the usual school bus drivers would want to flee with their families, but you can't tell me that the Louisiana National Guard didn't have enough drivers who could operate them.
The Superdome and the Convention Center should have been embarkation points, not shelters. One of my more radical ideas: Car dealers in New Orleans should have just handed the keys to residents and asked the to drop off the cars in Baton Rouge or Biloxi or even Memphis. What's to lose? They took a total loss on the cars in their lots.
Get every river barge and every Amtrak car in town ready for the evacuation. It wasn't just the school buses -- every but of rolling and floating gear destroyed in NOLA was a lost opportunity. Save lives now, figure out the compensation later.
My other radical notion is based on the fact that Wal-Mart stores in the storm zone had ice and bottled water ready to sell before FEMA had ice and water ready to give away. The solution: Contract out emergency operations to Wal-Mart. The whole company has built its success on tight logistics and inventory control. Why try to reinvent the wheel?
Every car, bus, truck, boat, train, every vehicle lost n NOLA could have been used to save lives. NOLA needed a Dunkirk. But there was not enough advance planning, not enough authority to adjust on the fly, and not enough flexibility to keep an eye on the ball. The Red Cross and other charitable groups brought caravans of relief that were turned away by government authorities that hadn't gotten the right paperwork. That has to stop.
If I used my own money, or raised enough money, to bring truckloads of water and tents and medicine, I would have been stopped from doing so by men with automatic rifles. Instead, we have thousands of FEMA trailers that are lined up and sinking into the Arkansas mud because, two years latter, folks still haven't figure out how to distribute them. That has to stop.
If someone is bleeding to death from the femoral artery, you apply a tourniquet -- figure out how o save the leg later.
We need a way to speed response. If that means limited immunity, if it means changes to the insurance structure, these are all things we've got to look at. If we need an act of Congress t ensure that my effort to bring good food to the hungry means that I won't be sued out of existence if someone chokes, than damn it, let's get some legislation.