New Orleans, La., mayor Ray Nagin has unveiled the city’s new disaster plan. It’s quite a simple plan: Run for the hills, run for your lives.
“There will be no shelter of last resort,” Nagin said. Instead, people unable to flee the city on their own would gather at designated transit points, where public transportation would pick them up and take them away. People will be able to bring their pets, as long as they are in cages.
“Amtrak trains will also be used for evacuation purposes, which we’re really excited about,” Mr Nagin said. — BBC News
Hurricane Katrina killed over 1,300 people across the South and left over 1,000,000 homeless, after levees meant to protect New Orleans failed. Most residents of New Orleans have not returned, and the levees may not be restored before hurricane season begins next month.
Nagin will deliver a State of the City address next week, and faces Mitch Landrieu, currently lieutenant governor of Louisiana, in a run-off election for mayor on May 20.
There’s a very good probability that Nagin will be re-elected, partly due to his giving a State of the City speech right before the run-off election.
But what concerns me is the run like hell plan. New Orleans has already shrunk to less than half its former size. The more people run like hell, the fewer of them who will come back. Perhaps after a few decades, nature will finally make her point and reclaim the city forever. Until then, get yourself another hurricane (the drink) and don’t worry about it. Nagin will tell you when it’s time to run like hell.
This article was originally published at Hammer of Truth.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.
Video published by this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling+ license.
Facebook
Digg
del.icio.us
reddit.com
Newsvine
Mark Folse
May 03, 2006
Many will say “ah-ha!” and ask why this wasn’t the plan before. Simple: the population is shrunk by half, and the 100,000 carless residents reduced to less than 1,000. It was never considered feasible by any prior government of the city to evacuate the entire place while full. Some of us will remember the discussion of ideas like “vertical evacuation” (meaning, pile into highrise buildings).
The practical application of always evacuate means that the city’s economy will never recover. It should only be taken seriously when plans to evacaute Miami and Houston in every Cat 2 storm are in place.
Until the, what we should do is starting shutting down all the xmas trees on all the pipelines and filling in the canals in order to stem coastal erosion. Perhaps when people notice that, without Louisiana gas is 6,7 or 8 dollars a gallon, the funding necessary for levee protection and coastal erosion will be forthcoming.
Jaime in Metairie
May 04, 2006
You are right Mark – I can rattle off 10 reasons why the school bus thing would not have worked. Shoot, they always said we would need at least 72 hours for any sort of an evacuation and we moved 1.5 million, give or take, in about 45 hours (there are 11 states that have fewer people than that). People critique the evacuation all the time but there is no city or state on earth that could have run a smoother or more effective one on such short notice (remember Rita?). Until Katrina no city had a plan for a 100% evacuation, anywhere. Also, regardless of the plan some people just will not leave. That being said I do not mind calling for evacuations on Cat 2’s. We are not ready to handle anything very strong right now. Last week’s rainstorm caused 2 of the pumps to burn up. For obvious reasons I don’t have tons of faith in the Army Corp right now and would rather see people out of harms way –at least for this year. Next year might be a different matter – who knows.
I’m also to the point of feeling like some drastic measures are in order. We could cut 20% of domestic production and see if people take notice. Why not stop use of the LOOP which handles about 13% of the nation’s foreign oil (most of which can’t be accommodated anywhere else in the country). Gosh, that would sting. Maybe if we shut down the grain elevators and the port and show America’s bread basket why we are here for them and how important we are for their lively hood, maybe then we could get protection. If we can just get our fair share of the oil and gas royalties then we can take care of protecting our wetlands and ourselves. Until then I think we do need to start to show the country why we need protecting.
May 04, 2006
Vitamin B16 » Carnival of Hurricane Relief, #36
Lenny Zimmermann
May 04, 2006
Yeah, I’m all for libertarian solutions to our problems down here, but most folks just don’t really have any understanding of the situation. The standard libertarian response is, effectively, “if you’re stupid enough to live below sea level, you deserve to drown.” Never really realizing there are some pretty good reasons for people to have settled and live here. Besides the Federal Government guaranteed levees that would withstand the a hurricane to the level of Katrina when it hit. Their levees failed. That, to me, is breech of contract and something most libertarians should understand quite well.
Now whether or not it was appropriate for the Federal government to have been involved in that situation to begin with is certainly debatable (although Federally there is a great deal of national interest to protect here, such as the national commerce implications of our port and the military valuer of that port as well.) But since that contract with us WAS in place, it’s only appropriate for the government to follow through pay reperations for the damage inflicted by their failed levee.
Lenny, also in Metairie
Michael Hampton
May 04, 2006
Lenny, there’s plenty of real estate in the area that’s above sea level, and even above the level of the worst possible storm surge, that it seems silly to me that anybody would attempt to reclaim the low-lying and other flood-prone areas in the first place. But they did. It’s a risk they took.
What pisses me off is that the rest of us are forced at gunpoint to help them mitigate that risk.
The last time I was in New Orleans, the fact of the expanse of the city made me nervous. The first time I saw one of those pumps, the first time I drove below a railroad overpass and knew I was far below sea level and that most of the city was a death trap waiting to spring.
As for the federal government paying off for the failed levees, that’s my money you’re talking about.
Lenny Zimmermann
May 05, 2006
It’s my money, too, Michael. And the local region has been paying it quite well for almost 40 years particularly for those levees. Not to mention the money coming out of our region that does not get returned here (think oil leases, for one.) You treat it as if somehow New Orleans were getting some disproportionate level of assistance when we’ve long paid a disproportionate level going OUT of the region and to other places for far longer then that.
The whole “above sea level” argument barely flies because when all is said and most of all of south Louisiana is below river level, so all of the same sea-level arguments apply at even higher elevations if the Mississippi River levees were to break down. None of that mitigates that fact of the vital need for this region, and folks to live and work here, to this nation as a whole and primarily in one of those big areas that is normally accepted for being under the Federal watchdog, commerce. (Yeah, I know more than a few Libertarians, and Anarchists in particular, would not consider that a legitimate form of government, but frankly I don’t lean towards Anarchy in my libertarian beliefs.)
The simple fact remains, however (not matter WHOSE money any of us thinks it is), that the United States Army Corps of Engineers designed and built those levees under the direction of the United States Congress in the belief that such protection was needed to protect an area the United States Congress considered vital to the National interest (for whatever reason.) The Corps was amply shown that their design did NOT comply with the mandated protection requirements, it was flawed. They did not correct their design flaws and a city that never should have flooded from a Cat 3 storm was inundated. Regardless of how the funding was obtained to begin with it WAS obtained and it WAS guaranteed.
The feds dropped the ball and broke the contract. Now it might be one thing to say the Feds should not be involved in rebuilding or repairing those levees, but making reparations for shoddy workmanship I just cannot agree that somehow our government should not be liable for their fuck-ups just because we local New Orleanians aren’t the only ones paying taxes. Sorry dude, the government has gotten far too many free rides off of the American people and provided very little in return. Even locally the money supposedly earmarked for us has often been squandered away in Washington, D.C. more than anyplace else and the locals get stuck with the bill.