A year before Katrina, New Orleans evacuated as Ivan approached the mouth of the river and the Mayor said let's go. It was a fiasco on the roads. The contraflow wasn't opened soon enough. It wasn't designed well enough. It took 12 hours to get to Baton Rouge. People gave up and stayed home. They ran out of gas on the highways.

Shortly after the storm, the Louisiana State Police and Department of Transportation announced that the contraflow had worked well. People reacted with outrage. The state decided that maybe it didn't work that well and needed to be fixed. They changed it and it worked better. (It's funny how often we have to learn from direct personal experience. It was a shame for all those folks in Texas that their police couldn't learn from Louisiana's experience. There is no doubt in my mind that they will do a better job next time.)

The evacuation for Katrina worked so well that its highway dynamics will not be remembered at all.

This time the story of the evacuation centers on those that didn't get out and the buses left flooded in parking lots. It seems odd that after Ivan with so much focus on the evacuation no one really asked about those who stayed behind to determine if there were ways that more could have been evacuated. Well, maybe next time we'll get that right.