Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OT: Katrina and World Support?

>>For the life of me, I cannot figure out why any human being would even think that the fact that some people chose to stay is worth mentioning or even an issue here.

There are two separate issues, both valid :

1. If more of the people who *could* have left had actually done so, it would have been much easier to look after the ones who Had to stay behind -- and what seems like an inadequate response might have been sufficient. The Superdome could have supported 5000 people for a week (for example) but was quickly overwhelmed with 25000+ people. You have to make some assumptions when you plan... and I think we would agree that at least PART of the problem is people who didn't follow the plan for relatively petty reasons.

Even worse, the people who stayed behind to party (or worse, to loot, or just because of lack of imagination) seem to be the biggest part of the problem now. They are bored, they are fighting, they expect that the government should have taken good care of them even though they did not follow the government's instructions. Bottom line, they are now one of the biggest parts of the problem and are disrupting efforts made for the larger group of people who are just looking to survive.

2. Notwithstanding the above, it does seem as if the actions of both local and federal governments could have been better. While I think we all agree that spending more $$ to beef up the levees before they collapsed would have been the ideal solution, there has been a couple of years to figure out "hey, one day this is all gonna come tumbling down, we'd better have a plan". I don't see signs of a good plan.

A trivial example would be the evacuation of NO -- from all the pictures they only used half the lanes on the highways so traffic jams getting out of the area were much worse than necessary. Didn't seem to be any real preparation in terms of potable water storage etc, even something as simple as building a few reservoirs which were high enough above sea level that even the worst case surge from a cat 5 hurricane would not go over the walls.

BTW, it seems like the main reason for shooting at the rescue workers is to encourage them to "come rescue me first" by bouncing a few bullets off the vehicles, ie "if you don't rescue me first you ain't gonna rescue anyone". I'm not even going to comment on that...