Is the Evacuation Plan Workable?

This site has discussed previously the practicalities of a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans (or indeed any major metropolitan area). We have defended Ray Nagin's decision to delay issuing a mandatory evacuation of the city before Katrina on the grounds it just couldn't be done.

At least today evacuating the city should be easier now that the population, especially the "poorer" population, is much smaller. Also, people are gun shy and will heed even an evacuation advisory. But the plan appears to be still unworkable. Let's consider the facts.

1. A mandatory evacuation would be put in place 30-36 hours prior to landfall. The mandatory evacuation for Katrina was issued on Sunday morning, around 20 hours prior to landfall. That means, if such a plan had been in place for Katrina the mandatory evacuation would have been issued no earlier than Saturday lunchtime. Many people were already evacuating New Orleans by then anyway. It would have been chaos if everyone in the city had tried to evacuate at the same time.

2. The new plan involves loading up Amtrak trains with the elderly and infirm, and presumably any others without transportation. A number of trains will be required to move a significant number of people. Where are these trains coming from? How many trains does Amtrak have available to send to New Orleans in time for such a mission? Amtrak will have to send trains down to New Orleans. These will obviously have to be available 2 days beforehand which means they will have to be dispatched at least a day or two before that.

3. The mandatory evacuation will be enforced by the police and National Guard. Again this means that the National Guard will have to be called up at least one or two days before the evacuation order is given.

So what's my point. According to this plan, a mandatory evacuation would have been ordered around noon on August 27th for Katrina. To put trains and National Guard on the ground at this time, you would need to put your contingency plan into operation no later than noon on Friday the 26th, and preferably end of day on Thursday 25th. On the Thursday night Katrina was just being upgraded to a hurricane in the Atlantic and was approaching the Florida coast. On Friday morning, she was moving off of the Florida coast and the first weather forecasts for the future path were just coming out. It will require a hair trigger to put a contingency for a Katrina like storm in place, and it would likely have made little difference. Except that there would have been no shelters of last resort. Even now there are only 80 buses available for the estimated 10,000 residents without transport.

This plan runs the risk of evacuating the city everytime it looks like a tropical storm is entering the Gulf. This would have required 5 evacuations in 2005. This will get very old very fast for a lot of people, despite the memories.

So we support Mayor Nagin's original decisions. Any effort to provide transportation for those who want it, is obviously welcome, but this plan will not prevent what happened last August 29th. The problems were those of poorly maintained levees and a disgraceful response when the call for help went out. Let's not think we can shift blame (yes, I'm playing the blame game) from the Dunce in Chief and Chertoff the Jerk off.