But the bulk, perhaps 90% couldn’t afford to get out. Most didn’t own a car, some had a clunker of some sort and nowhere to go. You need a credit card once you get on the road: you can’t just sleep, eat, and shower in the car.

I am so tired of hearing whiney annoying people say they didn't have a car! Give me a break if a hurricane with these types of implications were coming my way and my family had a 4 to 5 day warning we would of hiked to high ground! People say they didn't have any money. Well they still dont have any money or food just as before but know instead of being out of the floods way they are right in the middle of it putting our army and national guardsman in harms way not to mention the fire deparment and the police! Liberals always want to have an excuse for someones suffering yet this excuse can never be the truth which is the majority of these people are to blame for their current suffering (as far as the flood is concerned). Don't get me wrong I think the response could of been faster and their should be an investigation into why it was so slow, but on the other hand if authorities did not have to rescue all these SELFISH IDIOTS who stayed behind maybe responses could of been directed into better ways! Anytime someone see's a poor person or a minority suffering in this country they always have to have an excuse for it . When the truth is the majority of the poor are poor for a reason which is they never got hard work and intelligence instilled in them by their parents or whoever raised them. Wake up LIBS it's the truth stop lying to yourselves!!!

This refrain is familiar. "It's all their fault for not evacuting, and it would have been impossible to prevent..."
First, please check this account of the flood in the WSJ.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112603869789333061,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us

N.O. survived the hurricane winds just fine, as it has many others. Having heard exaggerated alarms before, some old timers didn't listen when they should have.
But the bulk, perhaps 90% couldn't afford to get out. *Most didn't own a car*, some had a clunker of some sort and nowhere to go. You need a credit card once you get on the road: you can't just sleep, eat, and shower in the car.
" 50 Billion dollars" I can't see where you get this figure. It would have cost millions, not billions to fix the known weaknesses in the levees.
" marched to the super dome"..
Local residents knew conditions at the dome would not be clean or orderly and stayed home. Once they heard of the piles of feces, plus the stories of rapes and gangs, they stayed home. That was a fatally wrong decision, but one can understand why many called it that way, especially people who didn't have their act quite together with a chart of flood heights on the fridge. We don't owe them a new mind with more sense, but it shouldn't be a death sentence.
In response to an earlier post (9/1 14:22)
"In terms of flooding and such, though, one presumes that stockpiles would also be subject to the same flooding, no? That is, we could preposition a warehouse full of food and water and have it rendered inaccessible by the storm."
Um, no. NO is a bowl. Just position the stuff about 10mi outside the bowl, not hundreds, and use foodstuffs much cheaper than MREs. We had a system food+water system in place for fallout shelters; it's been done.
All the actors flunked: a few folks who had a way out and stayed, then the city, the state, and the feds.
Only in the case of the Feds did we have an agency head, Michael Brown of FEMA, cracking jokes (and laughing at his own jokes) in a press conference just after the flood (Tuesday or Weds). He also had no clue that people were stranded at the convention center, while that had been reported by every TV network for over 12 hours.
Of course the governor's performance was shameful as well.

The New Orleans airport is open to emergency traffic. However, how about C130s landing a New Orleans as well as other Area Airports? Food and water 50 miles away is a lot better than 1,000 miles away.

C130s land on dirt.

No amount of excuses can conceal the lack of preparedness and execution on the part of government.

They've been doing that.

Have you noticed how the media has been doing a totally schizo job on this, from "Ha ha ha! The cops are looting Walmart!" to "Chaos! Anarchy! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!"

They're not reporting the people trying to clean up the convention center and lining up waiting to be picked up when the authorities showed up... only to have weapons pointed at them when they tried to help the national guard safely distribute supplies!

Total organizational failure followed by uncaring brutality:

"Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.

"The buses never stop."

Someone wanted expertise in disaster relief?

From a commenter at Brad DeLong:

I've spent years working on and helping coordinate search and rescue and forest fire-fighting operations (though admittedly never in hurricane relief). This thing just looks like the consummate clusterfuck. An earlier poster pointed out that navy rescue and hospital ships are late in getting started, but from what I can gather is that the fundamentals have been screwed up coming and going. There were no inland staging areas of resources, there was a complete failure to drop cargo nets of humanitarian food packets (MREs of lentils that say "a gift from the citizens of the United States" on them) and blivets (giant water balloons) of potable water. I mean, that stuff is basic - like the first things you secure for a big project fire. And, yes, this is a scale that I have never seen before. But the fundamentals: water, food, sanitation (I have no idea how you secure that helicopter - maybe empty dumpsters with toilet seats over the sides?) are the kind of thing that you start staging when bad shit looks imminent, not a day or two after the shit has hit the fan. I am so f*ing ashamed.

But I'm sure this guy's wrong, and we couldn't do anything, because we're just a 3d world country.

Oh, and look here: Chertoff denies any lack of food at the convention center, and the FEMA head says the feds didn't even know there were people there until today.

THAT IS WHY THERE IS SUPPOSED TO BE A PLAN AHEAD OF TIME.

The NYT showed copters landing water & food tonight at the CC. Thank God.

Have you noticed that many of the victims are not interested in helping themselves. Could not the strong at least put the litter in a pile? I seem to remember 9/11 victims helping each other and not just yelling "Someone come help me."

If al-Qaeda releases a nuke or chemical attack in another city, apparently the federal response will be just this bad.

This is the crux of the matter. A terrorist attack would present about the same scale of catastrophe. This is not a good omen of our capabilities to deal with such an attack 4 years after 9/11. A real disgrace.

They say "You got to, got to, got to feed the hungry"
"You got to, got to, got to heal the sick"
I say we ain't gotta do nothin' for nobody
'Cause they won't work a lick.

They just gonna have to roll with the punches, yes they will.
Gonna have to roll with them.
They gonna have to roll with the punches, yes they will.

It don't matter whether you're white, black or brown
You won't get nowhere putting down
The old Red, White and Blue.

Tap it baby.
Alright!
Look at those little shorts he's got on, ladies and
gentlemen
You can see all the way to Argentina
Get it!
So pretty...

Let 'em go to Belgium, let 'em go to France
Let 'em go to Russia
Well at least they ought to have the chance to go there
We have talked about the red, we have talked about the blue
Now we gonna talk about the white
That's what we're gonna have to do
Now we had to roll with the punches, yes we did
We had to roll with 'em
We had to roll with the punches
Yes we did
We had to roll with 'em

I don't care what you say
You're livin' in the greatest country in the world
When you're livin' in the USA

Tap it out, baby.
Alright!

Amateurs say "it can't be done," experts get it done. Or to quote another source, "genius does what it must, talent does what it can."

The Jackson airport could've been ready at once had a major seat-of-the-pants effort been made.

The bottom line is, THERE WAS NO PLAN FOR THIS. *That* is what's driving me & others nuts. (Why the hell did FEMA identify this as a major threat in 2001 and only get around to very preliminary gaming ("Hurricane Pam") in 2005?)

If al-Qaeda releases a nuke or chemical attack in another city, apparently the federal response will be just this bad. Are y'all really so cool with that? Ready to make excuses? Shrugging off the human cost of incompetence? Why???

Experience living in Mississippi & Louisiana, that's why.

I’m just wondering, Anderson, if you’ve had any formal training in disaster relief?

It kinda sounds more like you have an ax to grind…

It's an either/or? No formal training whatsoever, a quality I share with the head of FEMA and the head of Homeland Security. No ax to grind either. I would have loved the relief efforts to be a flawless operation casting a golden light on Bush's administration.

I don't really care *how* relief's handled, and as I just commented elsewhere at OTB, I didn't have grandiose expectations for what could be done: fill the city with troops by Tuesday night, and have plenty of food/water for the wretches at the convention center & Superdome. Cirby's "local supplies" would be JUST FINE, if anyone actually had a plan to get them & deliver them.

There's a weird pro-Bush complacency at work here that does not fit my pride in the U.S.A. "Oh, of course we can't provide our troops with armored vehicles after 2 years of war." "Oh, of course we can't provide food and water by air in 24 hours' time." I believe that if the President's people had declared those to be unalterable priorities, they would've happened. But no.