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Mayor Orders Mandatory Evacuation of New Orleans

Posted by Soulskill on from the everybody-out dept.

Pickens writes "City officials ordered everyone to leave New Orleans beginning Sunday morning — the first mandatory evacuation since Hurricane Katrina flooded the city three years ago — as Hurricane Gustav grew into what the city's mayor called 'the storm of the century' and moved toward the Louisiana coast. 'This is the real deal. This is not a test. For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life,' said New Orleans mayor, C. Ray Nagin. Already, hundreds of thousands of residents had begun streaming north from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas stretching from the Florida Panhandle to Houston. Bush administration officials took pains not to be caught as flatfooted as they were in Hurricane Katrina, announcing that President Bush had called governors in the region to assure them of assistance and that top federal emergency officials were in the region to guide the response. 'We could see flooding that is worse than what we saw with Katrina,' said Louisiana Governor Jindal." The US Geological Survey will be running a real-time "Map of Hydrologic Impacts" to monitor flood levels, and the National Weather Service has charted direction and wind-speed probabilities. Reader technix4beos points out the need for IRC transcription of FEMA and NOAA feeds.

3 of 712 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what the hell? by Zerth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This isn't Sim City where you can just 'declare something an industrial zone' and call it good.

    Apparently you've never heard of a zoning commission. Those morons do it all the time.

    Where you have industry, you also have to have (nearby) the people to operate the industry and the people who support them.

    Apparently you've never heard of New York or LA. Can't afford to live with an hour of some places.

    They should go ahead and rebuild the port and industrial infrastructure, then build some mass transit(light rail, it's cheaper per tile:) to the nearest STABLE and ABOVE SEA LEVEL region and put the residential & commercial there.

    That way they just have to repair the tracks and the "stupid end" of the rail system when it floods and nobody drowns.

  2. "Hurricane Relief" sites already in the works... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.dshield.org/diary.html?storyid=4954 (dshield.org)

    "Here we go again - Hurricane Relief Sites

    Remember three years ago when hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the US Gulf coast? On the day Katrina hit New Orleans hundreds of donation sites appeared online, many if not most were scam sites. Well this time around it looks like the people who like to register domain names in anticipation of a storm's arrival have already started registering them for Gustav and Hanna. I'm not suggeting that they are up to no good, but simply pointing out that the rush has started and we need to make sure our users are aware of the potential for scam sites appearing online in the next few days."

  3. The forecasts are powered by Linux by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The National Hurricane Center did an excellent prediction job, just as they did with Katrina. The storm is almost exactly on the predicted track from the last three days. It's all done on Linux. The forecaster's desktops run Red Hat Linux. The back end systems run Linux. The supercomputing clusters run Linux.