[StBernard] EDITORIAL: Mandatory: Let's refocus in the new year

[Westley Annis]

EDITORIAL: Mandatory: Let's refocus in the new year 


>From The Times Picayune 

Written By: Stephanie Grace 
Published Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Here's one of my wishes for the new year: that we're through debating
whether Mayor Ray Nagin or Gov. Kathleen Blanco should have called for a
mandatory evacuation of New Orleans sooner than the day before Katrina made
landfall. 

I wish members of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the
Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina would stop lecturing city
and state leaders on the subject of urgency. Or at the very least, if they
must, I wish they would acknowledge a few things first: 


-- That the evacuation, in both its voluntary and mandatory phases, was
orderly and relatively trouble-free, owing in no small part to the fact that
everyone stuck to a state plan that had been fine-tuned after previous
misadventures. And that an estimated 1.2 million people got out of a
metropolitan area with very few escape routes in a very short period of
time. 

-- That, while many New Orleanians surely did not have transportation out of
town, plenty who did chose to ride the storm out at home, even though Nagin
eventually told them, a day before the storm, that they had to leave. It's
horribly sad, but true, that they are well represented among Katrina's dead.


-- And that the city's emergency management plan did not contain all the
answers. 

You'd think it did, the way certain congressmen wielded it like a weapon,
waved it around like some sort of smoking gun during a major committee
hearing earlier this month. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., held the report
as he scolded Blanco for not stepping in when Nagin didn't make the
evacuation "mandatory" in the days preceding the storm. 

"It should have been mandatory and it should have been done sooner," he
said. "The fact that you don't recognize that is troubling." 

Yet the truth is that the document doesn't lay out a series of steps to be
taken once a mandatory evacuation is called. It doesn't say how to clear
hospitals of the desperately ill, or hotels of the out-of-town guests. It
doesn't explain how to transport those without their own cars, or where to
take them. And it doesn't address how such an order should be enforced.
Should the police go door to door, force stragglers still boarding up their
homes to leave at gunpoint? It doesn't say. 

The plan does start the clock at 72 hours before landfall, as another
combative committee member, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Kentucky, said. But
despite Rogers' suggestion to the contrary, it does not advocate anything
other than a "precautionary evacuation notice" that far ahead. General
evacuation, it says, should start 48 hours or less before landfall, which is
when officials issued a voluntary evacuation order, and started warning
people that this really could be the big one. 

In fact, it's well worth remembering that 72 hours before Katrina's 6:10
a.m. Monday morning landfall, forecasters still predicted the storm was
heading for the Florida panhandle. The track didn't shift in New Orleans'
direction until the National Hurricane Center's last report that Friday
night. 

The point it that some things went right, and some went horribly wrong. And
it's hard to see how the word "mandatory" would have changed that. So,
rather than fixating on when the proper sense of urgency kicked in back
then, how about paying more attention what's urgent now. 

Let's hope the new year brings a focus from all levels of government to
fixing and enhancing levees; restoring wetlands; revising emergency plans to
make sure buses are dry and drivers are on call; getting trailers delivered
and hooked up; laying out New Orleans' initial rebuilding plan; reforming
FEMA to make the agency more responsive to emergencies; and finally
approving federal legislation to buy out homeowners stuck with big mortgages
on wrecked homes. The $29 billion package that Congress approved last week
is a good start, but more is needed. 

Blanco, who mostly held her own under grueling questioning, said she worried
that the retroactive fuss over the evacuation "will be used as an excuse not
to do anything for us in the future." 

It's a legitimate concern. If there were no excuses for the many missteps
before and right after Katrina, there certainly shouldn't be any excuses
now.

. . . . . . . 

Stephanie Grace is a staff writer. She may be reached at (504) 826-3383 or
at sgrace at timespicayune.com. 

-30-


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