What a load of crap ~ besides being so very out-of-date.

I haven't been spending much time at Mudcat since Katrina, and even less time posting (as opposed to lurking), but as a New Orleanian caught in the middle of this bit of history, I can't let this one go by.

1) The days prior to Katrina saw the largest and most successful evacuation in recorded history of any American city. Period. Most of us ~ well over 80% of the million or so people in metropolitan New Orleans and of the additional thousands living in outlying areas to the south, east, and west ~ got out alive and in time. Gov. Blanco deserves a measure of credit for fine-tuning the "contraflow" Interstate highway routing plan that worked much more smoothly for the Katrina evacuation than for Ivan one year earlier. In hindsight, of course, there should have been better planning for the many poor folk unable to drive themselves out of town in vehicles of their own, but it's not as though any American city had ever provided mass evacuation transportation for its impoversihed citizens.

2) "72 hours before landfall," Katrina was just starting to grow into a big, dangerous mega-storm ~ it wasn't yet time to order a "mandatory evacuation," even if such a thing would ever be a practical possibility. No one seems to remember or to appreciate how suddenly a routine little cat-one hurricane blew up into such a monstrous storm. At my job, we had a regular "hurricane drill" that we executed once or twice every year ~ all computers turned off and moved up from the floor to high shelves. On the Friday before Katrina, we did NOT execute the drill, because we were not expecting any significant problems. In retrospect, we probably should have realized, because the storm did begin to get serious that Friday afternoon, but those of us who were busily working (i.e., not watching daytime TV) didn't begin to regard Katrina as a serious threat until we got home Friday evening. (For the record, the eye made landfall 8am Monday 8/29, well less than 72 hours later).

3) The decades-long refusal of Congress to fund annual requests for levee improvements, and the Corps' long history of slipshod engineering and construction practices, really can't be blamed exclusively on the current administration, or for that matter on either party to the exclusion of the other. However, GW Bush does deserve plenty of blame for the Katrina tragedy for his systematic conversion of FEMA from a professional disaster-management agency to a patronage mill for politically connected neophytes. Conscientious professionals had left FEMA en masse in the wake of severe funding cutbacks, accompanied by the appointment of clueless Bush cronies like Michael Brown as their "superiors." Bush's insistence that he remain on vacation at his ranch that week made him look pretty bad, too ~ although I'm not sure how helpful he would have been anyway.

I'd go on at greater length, but I wouldn't know where to stop. So I might as well stop right here.