Believe it or not, the following is an account of an Associated Press article written last year, after Hurricane Ivan. I’ve elipsed out references to Ivan, to help you see how government simply doesn’t learn. With a few exceptions, the story is nearly a word-for-word description of what happened with Katrina.

Local government officials learned nothing from Ivan. They made the same mistakes in Katrina that they made in Ivan, which they also made during Georges. The perpetual ineptitude finally caught up to them. Or, rather, to the people they serve.

“Those who had the money to flee…ran into hours-long traffic jams. Those too poor to leave the city had to find their own shelter – a policy that was eventually reversed, but only a few hours before the deadly storm struck land.”

Eventually, tens of thousands of New Orleanans were directed to the Superdome – where no food, water or living facilities were provided for the massive number of refugees expected to remain there for at least several days.

[...]

…as [the hurricane] approached the Gulf coast from the Gulf of Mexico, the city – warned by forecasters that a direct hit could send torrents of Mississippi River backwash over the city’s levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste – urged more than a million people to flee the wrath of the oncoming storm.

But nobody told them how to flee…

“‘They say evacuate, but they don’t say how I’m supposed to do that,’ Latonya Hill, 57, said at the time. ‘If I can’t walk it or get there on the bus, I don’t go. I don’t got a car. My daughter don’t either.’

“‘If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can’t evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature,’” Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU told the AP.

…city officials first said they would provide no shelter…then agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs. Only with [the hurricane] just hours away – did the city open the 20-story-high domed stadium to the public.

Mayor Ray Nagin’s spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the Superdome as Ivan approached, but said the evacuation was the top priority.

“Our main focus is to get the people out of the city,” she told the AP.

“We did the compassionate thing by opening the shelter,” Nagin said. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t have a repeat performance of what happened before. We didn’t want to see people cooped up in the Superdome for days.”

“When another dangerous hurricane, Georges, appeared headed for the city in 1998, the Superdome was opened as a shelter and an estimated 14,000 people poured in.” But just as happened after Katrina, the AP reported there were problems, including theft and vandalism.

“The main safety measure – getting people out of town — raised its own problems. More than 1 million people tried to leave the city and surrounding suburbs on Tuesday, creating a traffic jam as bad as or worse than the evacuation that followed Georges. In the afternoon, state police took action, reversing inbound lanes on southeastern Louisiana interstates to provide more escape routes. Bottlenecks persisted, however.

“Col. Henry Whitehorn, head of state police, said he believed his agency acted appropriately, but also acknowledged he never expected a seven-hour-long crawl for the 60 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

“Gov. Kathleen Blanco and [Mayor] Nagin both acknowledged the need to improve traffic flow and said state police should consider reversing highway lanes earlier. They also promised meetings with governments in neighboring localities and state transportation officials to improve evacuation plans.”

Shameful.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 4th, 2005 at 10:41 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.