Tell me what would happen in Indianapolis if suddenly everyone there had
to evacuate North? Where would you go?
Chuck Lewis wrote:
But isn't that a total failure of the emergency planners in NO ? That report
after the previous fiasco at the Superdome said should not be used again.
And wouldn't anyone with a brain in the cities emergency management group
have been painfully aware that folks down in those areas didn't drive, would
need to be bussed out or trucked out or something (i.e. they were not going
to jump into their cars since they didn't have them) and had personal
available to do the job ?
Chuck
-----Original Message-----
From: cpf0000-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cpf0000-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Wayne McAlpine
Sent: Sunday, April 08, 2007 10:15 PM
To: cpf0000@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [CPF0000] OIG Issues Report estimates over 600, 000 Fugitive
aliens in U. S. whereabouts unknown.
Very simple answer: there were no drivers--they had evacuated.
Regarding the Superdome, it was designated only as a temporary shelter
from the elements during the actual passage of the hurricane. When the
sun came out on Tuesday morning people expected to go back to their
homes to begin picking up the pieces and returning to normal. That's
what normally happens after a hurricane passes.
Instead, people were confronted with a man-made disaster on top of the
hurricane--the catastrophic failure of the levees that inundated large
portions of the city for several weeks. People had no place to return
to and the Superdome became not an overnight shelter, but the hell hole
that you saw on television. The waters from the hurricane itself had
caused minor flooding in some areas but those waters were already
receding when the levee failures occurred.
Without question, the levee failures have been laid at the doorstep of
the Corps of Engineers. At best the Corps is guilty of breathtaking
incompetence, and the investigation is ongoing as to whether there was
something more sinister involving substandard materials.
In hindsight I'm sure a lot of officials--federal, state and local--wish
they had done things differently.
One last thing, there is always a hard core of people who refuse to
evacuate for one reason or another. Some out of bravado, others out of
sheer stupidity. Some people refuse to leave their pets. Others have
no private transportation and no money--these were the people who got
lost in the shuffle and whose needs are being addressed now. We could
have done a better job with nursing home and hospital evacuations,
although most hospitals are designed to be emergency shelters with
auxiliary power and supplies of food and water. But like the Superdome,
they're not equipped for an extended outage with flooding and a total
breakdown in communications and civil order.
