New Orleans Roundup
Michael Froomkin points to a claim that “Long before FEMA dropped the ball, local authorities decided they didn’t need one: See See LENIN’S TOMB: Everything has gone according to plan.” For more, the City of New Orleans web site is still operational, and has a section on Emergency Preparedness. Bruce Sterling, with only a small amount of irony writes about international offers of help, “Thank Goodness, Here Come the Brave and Generous Indians to Rescue Louisiana.”
On a more positive notes, many colleges and universities are opening their doors to the students at Tulane. Simon’s Rock, the nation’s only four-year college of the liberal arts and sciences specifically designed to provide bright, highly motivated students with the opportunity to begin college in a residential environment after the tenth or eleventh grade, is opening its doors to 11th and 12th graders who are interested in starting college now.
If you do the math (at least, according to math I have seen) it is rather unlikely that any formal planned state/mayoral evacuation of the poor sans transport could have been conducted. There aren’t the facilities on hand to move the 100k or so over the plausible timescale of 24 hours (as the evacuation isn’t ordered until very late in the piece given near misses like Ivan).
An option might have been a driving pool approach, but I am not sure how likely it would be to couple each poor black family with a rich white SUV-owning family…
This still (to my mind) leaves the question of the shelters or lack of them open, as it were.