I can’t emphasize enough what a bad decision I think it is for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to delay the mandatory evacuation order until tomorrow morning. According to the Weather Channel, lots of tourists in the French Quarter are happy the evacuation is only “voluntary,” and are planning to stay in town until it becomes mandatory. Idiots. Those people may find themselves stuck on a highway with 180 mph wind gusts howling around them. (Of course, if that happens, they won’t actually be “stuck” for long. Nor will they be on the highway.)
Landfall is expected to occur around midday Monday. So by waiting until tomorrow morning, Mayor Nagin will be giving people scarcely 24 hours to get out. Perhaps he’s hoping to ease the evacuation traffic jams by starting things off with a trickle, but that’s awfully risky.
Will Ray Nagin go down in history as the mayor who fiddled while New Orleans drowned? Could be.
while the Mayor may be an idiot for delaying the evacuation call, if you have any common sense and watch the news for more than five minutes, you’re a moron for not getting out of dodge. (That was a long run-on sentence).
I remember being down in Florida last year when Jeanne was coming to town. I said screw the vacation and drove my rental car all the way back to Chicago!!!
True, but many people are morons (and/or simply ignorant, i.e. not paying attention to the news), and one of the crucial roles of government in disaster situations is to protect people from their own idiocy. Also, the morons and ig’nants who are predisposed to not evacuate tend to assume that “voluntary evacuation” means “not really that big a deal,” because they know from experience that “mandatory evacuation” is also an option.
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August 27th, 2005 at 9:01:15 pm
Contaflow is active. WWL is streaming their coverage free:
http://www.wwltv.com/
August 27th, 2005 at 10:36:46 pm
while the Mayor may be an idiot for delaying the evacuation call, if you have any common sense and watch the news for more than five minutes, you’re a moron for not getting out of dodge. (That was a long run-on sentence).
I remember being down in Florida last year when Jeanne was coming to town. I said screw the vacation and drove my rental car all the way back to Chicago!!!
August 27th, 2005 at 10:59:09 pm
True, but many people are morons (and/or simply ignorant, i.e. not paying attention to the news), and one of the crucial roles of government in disaster situations is to protect people from their own idiocy. Also, the morons and ig’nants who are predisposed to not evacuate tend to assume that “voluntary evacuation” means “not really that big a deal,” because they know from experience that “mandatory evacuation” is also an option.