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.