The New Plan

Mayor Ray Nagin has a new plan for evacuating New Orleans, which some may conclude isn't altogether different than this:


Seriously though, the new plan eliminates refuges of last resort or using the convention center or Superdome for evacuees. Somewhere, someone is going to complain that the plan means that for those who are unable to evacuate out of New Orleans and are inevitably forgotten by the local government, there will be no place for them to go within New Orleans that is safer than staying in their homes. Never mind the fact that in the face of an oncoming storm, everyone should take sufficient care to evacuate safely inland or to higher ground so that they are spared the worst of the damage to life and limb.

Brendan Loy rips Nagin for taking eight months to come up with the plan, which happens to be on the eve of the mayoral elections. Maybe he's hoping that New Orleans residents have a very short memory and forget his abysmal failure to prepare the city for the storm, including evacuating residents who couldn't flee on their own.

But although this new plan sounds great (assuming they actually implement it when the time comes, unlike their previous plan, such as it was), it’s truly a tragedy that they didn’t have an adequate plan last August — and it’s not forgivable on the basis that “hindsight is 20/20.” As I said, the threat of a storm like Katrina (or far worse) was long anticipated and feared, and New Orleans’s previous “plan” was self-evidently inadequate. Its inadequacy didn’t just become apparent because it didn’t work; the plan, as implemented, obviously didn’t deal with the serious problems that everyone knew existed. If the plan’s flaws only became apparent to the general public in retrospect, that’s because officials lied about the plan to hide its flaws. City officials get credit for doing a good job with the traffic problems — the contraflow worked very well — but they did absolutely nothing of significance to help those without private transportation.

Loy correctly points out that the threat of a major storm was not inconceivable before Katrina, and that evacuation plans were in place before Katrina but not fully or properly implemented. That we now have a new plan does not insure that it will be implmenented when the time comes. It's all about the accountability and making sure that city residents and their leaders recognize and learn from their errors.

UPDATE:
Laurence Simon notes that the new plan takes into account the fact that people don't want to abandon their pets so that buses and other evacueees will be able to take pets with them.