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Mayor Orders Mandatory Evacuation of New Orleans
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.
It's below sea level in one of the most hurricane prone places on earth. Why are rebuilding and living there?
Make it an industrial zone and be done with it. Use the money to permanently relocate the population, not rebuild their soon-to-be blown away homes again.
That frickin falling tree will knock out your INTERNET ACCESS dweeb!
That's fricking news to some of us!
Get the freaking hint - New Orleans is in one of the worst possible places, stop spending federal money rebuilding it. If people want to live there, let them suffer the entire burden of living there! If you want to spend federal money, spend it on relocation allowances and get people permanently away from the problem!
Make sure to read Naomi Kleins book "The Shock Doctrine" or at least one of her online articles: The Shock Doctrine in Action in New Orleans.
Are the mayor really allowed to do this? Last time New Orleans had an evacuation there where looting of the abandoned properties. Should it not be up to the owners to them self decide if staying behind to defend it is worth the risk or not?
Disclaimer: I am European. I don't think the government would have any problem doing it here. But are not Americans more concerned about their liberty (for example to risk drowning and looters) then we are?
Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
I really just curious - do feds or anyone from government did their work _after_ Katrina?
Of course they did, they're highly trained professionals after all.
They put up signs
However they didn't expect Gustav and forgot to translate them in German.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
So New Orleans is likely to be flooded yet again, but this is not a unique occurance. Florida is often trashed by hurricanes, and here in the UK much of our housing is on flood-plains, and some of our villages are crumbling into the sea due to coastal erosion.
You can't beat nature, but we've all got to live somewhere, and there is normally a very good reason for a settlement to be where it is.
It's a balancing act. Sometimes you need to put resources into sustaining a town/city, and elsewhere this may be inappropriate. The big question is 'Who decides?'
Smivs on the intertubes!
We do have a pressing need for personnel who can type fast, have a good ear for "American" dialect, and is willing to spend several hours transposing into IRC.
Please head to the linked wiki (either wiki.interdictr.com or gustavwiki.com ), or directly to the irc.freenode.net and join #interdictor
Cheers, see you there.
user@host$ diff
Unless a FEMA limo drives me out this city. I'm Black, I demand it! If not, I'll stay and loot!
Why mod Funny? I am sure this is happening. I am sure there will be chopper rescues on CNN. And I am sure we will pay for people who refuse to take care of themselves. (Not just those unable to) We saw it in Houston the first time, and most people I know used up all the compassion they had then...
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."
Don't use math as punishment - she will only grow up hating it and probably end up as a hairdresser.
It is truly saddening to read some of the comments. You write about wanting to displace people just because New Orleans is below sea level. You say that people are themselves responsible if they continue to live in a city which is below sea level. Let me remind you that there are locations in the Netherlands which are more than two times below sea level compared to that of New Orleans. New Orleans is of course much more prone to storms than the aforementioned place but I do not see why technology could not solve this [reinforcement] issue. New Orleans is after all an important city.
The forecasted track for Gustav is very similar to Andrew (1992). If I recall correctly, no formal evacuation of New Orleans was done for Andrew. Looks like we are having a Katrina induced over-reaction.
Journal
Where in the world *isn't* there a natural disaster waiting to happen. If it isn't hurricane, it's general flooding. If not flooding, then earthquakes. If not earthquakes, then wildfires, or tornadoes, or whatever your local flavor of emergency is. Make sure you're willing to pay for your emergency before you decide you don't want to pay for theirs.
Racists are racists. There are republican and democrat racists. Let's not discriminate on which racists we choose to hate. Plenty to go around.
There is nothing wrong with people devoting their time, energy and money preserving New Orleans. It's your life after all. The problem is when you discover that you don't have enough and need to take some of my money too.
...and guess what. All democrats. Learn your history. Stop being a drone.
Apparently you think history stopped in 1964. Maybe you should pay attention to what happened since then: pretty much all the Democrats who opposed integration and civil rights legislation had become Republicans by the end of the 1960s. One of the very few exceptions was, yes, Robert Byrd, who has over and over recanted his racist views, apologized for the evil he did, and worked hard for racial equality. For decades now, the KKK crowd has been the property of the Republican Party.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
And immediately right after LBJ (Democrat) worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963 he told his advisors that he signed the South to Republicans.
Ever since, the South has been voting Republican.
So yes, they are still racist.
Who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights act?
Check the vote breakdown by party and region. It was predominantly SOUTHERNERS of BOTH parties who opposed the bill. Remember them? They were the folks who started a civil war to keep slavery around. The vote breakdown was very clearly along regional lines not party lines.
However if you insist on defending the republicans on this issue, a few southern democrats actually voted for the act - no southern republicans did. Furthermore most of the northerners who voted against the act were republicans. So yeah, in general if someone was racist in 1964 odds were better that they were republican than democrat. Odds also tell us they were likely from the south regardless of party affiliation.
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.
Byrd's a Republican now? Shit, when did he switch parties?
When his party changed around him, Byrd saw the error of his ways, apologized, and set to work trying to undo the damage he had done. Most of his "Dixiecrat" contemporaries, like Thurmond and Helms, never did ... so they went over to the Republicans, who welcomed them with open arms.
It's simultaneously amusing and sad how Republicans have to reach back decades to find slurs for Democrats, while the current Republican Party presents such a target-rich environment for those Democrats with the guts to take advantage of it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In New Orleans, without electricity the pumps stop and the city defaults to it's flooded state. California's default state is "normal" with the earthquake being the anomaly. California doesn't drop chunks into an abyss every time the power drops out.
Care to cite the links between the KKK and the Republican party. Apparently I'm uneducated since I failed to find any.
Don't try to pretend I said something I didn't. I said "the KKK crowd" rather than just "the KKK" quite deliberately; there aren't really any links between any political party and the KKK itself any more, because except for a few die-hards the KKK as an organization has been pretty much defunct for decades -- thanks in large part to the efforts of Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Democratic Attorneys General Kennedy, Katzenbach, and Clark. By "the KKK crowd" I mean, of course, the sorts of people who would be Klansmen if it were still socially acceptable ... including, again, almost all the ex-Dixiecrats except Byrd, who nearly alone among his contemporaries had the guts not only to admit that he was wrong, but also work to do something about it. Meanwhile, Thurmond's and Helms' spiritual heirs go Republican in overwhelming numbers.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
California doesn't drop chunks into an abyss every time the power drops out.
Thankfully not, what with rolling blackouts.
Funnily enough, I happened to be in Louisiana during Katrina and happened to be working for the government at the time. A small portion (like 25%) of our state's national guard was in the process of standing down from Iraq when Katrina hit, and they were actually rotated into the city during the aftermath because our governor wanted to try and save face and look tough by deploying "combat hardened troops" that will "shoot to kill." One of the main Reserve bases in Louisiana, funnily enough, is IN New Orleans and the other 75% of our National Guard was sitting on their asses waiting for orders, as they were under control of the state government, not the federal government. Bush moving in and federalizing those troops would have been seen as a huge violation of states rights and an assurpation of power, as essentially the only legal basis he could have used for it would have been to declare the state of Louisiana to be rebelling and essentially removed the state government from power. In hindsight, that probably would have been a better option.
FEMA, funnily enough, responded more quickly to Katrina in New Orleans than they did to Andrew in Homestead, FL. The cynic in me would say that's because of the demographic differences between the two locations, but such baseless theorycrafting serves no one. FEMA (and pretty much any federal disaster relief agency) is in fact paralyzed without local and state government support and cooperation, as their primary role is organization and logistics; ie: figuring out who needs what and seeing that they get it. They need state and local governments (like the national guard, state police, etc.) to provide the actual manpower to accomplish anything, and in the case of Katrina our lovely (and unsurprisingly deposed) governor just sat around and dithered while people died. She even admitted herself (not realizing that the cameras were on) that she should have sent the guard in earlier and when the president offered to take over for her (since she was obviously in over her head) she told him she'd think about it and get back to him in 24 hours.
But of course, it's obviously Bush's fault, he's such a big meanie that Blanco was too scared to call and ask for help...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
"And here I thought we had this thing called a "nation" which embodied some elements of teamwork and shared pain/shared gain."
That only goes so far here. This is America, and you're still expected to do what you can for yourself first. This isn't a socialist country where we care for each other's every need. If you've got a disaster, we'll pitch in and help, but when you're told to do things like, oh, get the fuck out of town, and you don't do it, then you can't blame the "Nation" for that. And it's not the "Nation's" responsibility to put you up in a FEMA trailer 3 years after Katrina. And yet there are still people that live in them, people perfectly capable of going out and getting their own place, and a new job. I'd say we go above and beyond in "Shared Pain/Gain". If you want any more, move to Sweden.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I'm sick of people calling out Bush for a slow response to Katrina. There's plenty to dislike about Bush we don't need to make crap up.
For anyone who for some reason doesn't know this: The federal government cannot go in and provide aid in a place like post-Katrina New Orleans unless the governor asks for it. It's against the law and the very basic nature of our country for the federal government to just go and do that kind of stuff. The governor in Louisiana was slow to ask for aid and was therefore slow to get it.
Bush actually tried to pass a law that would allow the federal government to quickly respond to such disasters and he was accused of trying to take over with an oppressive hand.
Seriously, I dislike Bush as much as the next guy but I'm not so stupid that I can't see the reality of a situation.
or else!
The evacuation is over. The airport has closed, the buses have stopped running, the last train is gone, and the roads are empty. 5% - 10% of the population remains.