Good news: 182,000 rescued.
Bad News: Chris Regan and Bryan Preston, in “Ghost Plans for a Ghost Town,”, compare what happened with plans and predictions from the experience of Ivan and discussions in the November 2004 Natural Hazards Observer. Their grim (and detailed) comparisons conclude:
So the buses sat in their lots. The winds and the floods came, the unlucky local officials kicked in Plan B, and the city of New Orleans drowned with its least fortunate trapped inside. The evacuation plan was a plan, but it was really just a ghost plan with ghost buses and ghost drivers, with ghost emergency supplies kept in ghost “shelters” under control of a ghost police force with a ghost emergency communications system overseen by a ghastly governor.
It was a plan for a ghost town. That plan worked.
And here come the ghosts.
We’d better learn from them. The countless dead will expect nothing less.
But, let’s include some relatively heartening news–some things did, indeed, work. More got out, for instance, than was predicted. Richard Baehr. in The American Thinker synthesizes 7 “realities” to counter the “mythology on Katrina” he contends will keep Snopes busy in the future.
And Goldberg’s take on a moment mentioned in an earlier post: Jonah Goldberg discusses the “soft bigotry” (and tired tropes) of Randall Robinson.
More good news: Creative Destruction is going to work. The stock market’s up 140 points, and so’s consumer spending. The Yankee economy is surging in advance of the expected reconstruction.
Construction companies and building materials retailers, heavy equipment manufacturers, fuel providers, and the attendant service economy can expect to boom during NO’s regeneration.
Let’s hope the population of the new New Orleans takes local elections more seriously. They should expect better service from their public servants.
-Steve
Via Captain Ed:
ABC News yesterday asked why Mayor Ray Nagin not only did not follow the plan, but actively sent non-evacuees to a site that had no preparations to handle them:
AND
ABC also asked Governor Kathleen Blanco’s office about their response to the evacuation. They responded that they never asked for evacuation assistance from the federal government as part of their interaction with FEMA, only for assistance with shelter and provisions. They assumed that the city of New Orleans had followed its own evacuation plan.
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I wonder if this has anything to do w/the polls and response time not sticking to W?