 jatfla says: Interesting information now that time and hysteria have settled. I remeber watching Fox News about 48 hours before Katrina hit and Sheperd Smith asked a fellow on Bourbon Street why he had not followed the President's suggestion to evacuate - His response: "Go F*@^ yourself". Most do not understand that Hurricane Katrina was not really the issue. The issue was a levee failure. That levee failed because milions of dollars earmarked to improve the levee system were used for other purposes. Yet, the levees were used on several occasions to obtain funding, each time the funds were not used to improve the levees. We have similar issues here in our city. $$$ marked for particular problems being siphoned off for commissioner's pet projects. Since we didn't vote for a city tax increase, we are being threatened (even is actually happening in some cases) to having important services merged or curtailed. Yet a headline from our morning paper read: "City Spending Green to Go Green". Hmmmmm. The 25% of residents in Katrina-affected areas who would refuse to evacuate is actually 2% less than other coastal residents who would not evacuate if ordered to. And their reasons for not wanting to evacuate seem reasonable enough to me: fear of violence, fear of not being able to get away safely, not enough food, gas, or money to evacuate, access to medical care. It doesn't take too much imagination to think that this 25% might represent a large number of the elderly, or infirm, or house-bound, or people without cars or reliable transportation, the poor. In fact, a study just showed that would really killed people in New Orleans was not poverty, but AGE. It was old, black, poor... Ray Nagin pretty much watched them die, while hundreds of public buses sat, only to be flooded. "Conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the mayor of New Orleans. The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life-saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedure as needed. Approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans do not have means of personal transportation." |
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