The different news agencies was my first thought too. Also, it wouldn't surprise me if the AP caption was modified after the looting became the "story of the day".

See, maybe I'm cynical (scratch that: I know I'm cynical), but that statement about leaving the poor behind doesn't surprise me at all. It's the Reagan legacy of pragmatic paternalism.

A semi-contrarian view: my understanding is that the authorities weren't allowed to officially call for a "mandatory" evacuation until Sunday. It seems to me that the logistics of evacuating 50,000 people who don't have transportation of their own in less than 24 hours (especially when there are another 450,000 people who do have their own transportation also trying to leave at the same time) are probably kind of difficult.

Add to that the fact that there were people who didn't want to leave. I have no idea how many, but (for example) Poppy Z. Brite was saying on Saturday that she was going to stay; it wasn't until Sunday that she decided to leave. I'm sure there were many who wanted to leave but couldn't (including most of the tourists in town, btw), but I suspect that there were some who honestly didn't want to go.

Also, there were several places of last resort (not just the Superdome) planned for holding people who couldn't leave town on their own, so it's not like such people were left entirely to their own devices.

Also, the current situation as I understand it is that the authorities are now actively trying to remove everyone from the city.

None of that sounds to me like anywhere near as actively malicious toward poor people as the claim that "the plan" was to leave the poor people behind to drown.

I'm not saying that the authorities did all they could. But I think it's unfair to suggest that they should and could have somehow managed to evacuate 50,000 to 100,000 people on Sunday. I'm actually astonished that even 80% of the residents managed to get out; that seems really impressive to me.

It's true that evacuating a city of that size is a huge undertaking, and that some people were too stubborn to leave. However, there was no civic component to the evacuation--the mayor told folks to get out, and left it up to them to find a way out. Most of the people who didn't leave had no means to do so; no car, no means to rent one, no money for other transportation. Even those who could have scraped together enough for a bus ticket were probably screwed, because it's my understanding that the Greyhound station was shut down as of Saturday afternoon.

There's no proof, of course, that the email came from anyone actually involved in the rescue efforts, or that there was an actual capitulation (tacit or explicit) of 10-20% of the population. And pointing fingers is not much help when there are still people in need of rescue. But from here it looks like there was no good plan in place for something that's been anticipated for decades, and that's inexcusable.

I'm mostly with Jed on this one, although I can see the other side too. It does seem like it would have been a good idea for the city to provide some free mass transit out; but I'm also not sure that would have been feasible or truly addressed the problem in the timeframe we're talking about. I'm not even truly sure that a better plan for evacuating low income residents would have solved the problem, with, as others have pointed out, highways jammed to the max with others leaving Dodge. Plans have a funny way of not standing up to reality. And let's face it, I doubt any of us would have supported a _forced_ evacuation of anyone in New Orleans before yesterday. There's part of me that feels queasy about the National Guard keeping people at the Superdome.

There were also stories coming out questioning the mayor's judgment in even calling for the "mandatory evacuation," something that is truly rare in any American city -- and in fact many people growsing about it to media outlets when it appeared that the city had been largely spared the worst.

Dave, if that email was accurate, then somebody really screwed up by opening the Superdome.

The trouble I can see with free mass transit is that there would be many taking advantage of it that didn't really need it. While it would still probably be more effective than simply stuffing people in the Superdome (a refuge that many who stayed refused), the answer isn't as simple as just setting aside a few buses. I suspect that those who didn't go to the Superdome woulde be unlikely to leave town no matter what means were provided.

I'm curious as to why a mandatory order to evacuate the city couldn't come until Sunday. Is it simply to avoid evacuating everyone until they were positive the hurricane wasn't going to change course? Perhaps they'll err on the side of caution from now on.

Dave, if that email was accurate, then somebody really screwed up by opening the Superdome.

I'm not claiming it is. Don't make me into the advocate for a conspiracy theory. All I've been trying to say is that it doesn't seem that difficult to conceive of that there may have been a collateral damage consensus, particularly in light of how it all went down. We're fiction writers; I'm positing scenarios, not expounding upon an article of faith.

Regardless of whether anybody actively decided to let the poor folks drown, it’s a matter of record that the state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness knew last year that roughly 100,000 New Orleans residents didn’t have cars, and apparently no one (other than the Red Cross, who according to this article were to develop a carpool scheme) made any plans to provide transportation for them. It’s one thing not to force out those who don’t want to leave; it’s another not to help those who do want to leave but can’t.

In the exercise that article refers to, they expected only a third of the residents to make it out. The fact that so many did make it out is, as Jed says, impressive, but I’m almost more appalled by the fact that it was expected to be worse.

It’s probably stupid to even try to hash this stuff out now. I’m sure there will be plenty of public hearings and recriminations later.

Maybe it's because I've just finished reading Collapse and Forty Signs of Rain, but I can't help thinking that in addition to the issue of screwing the poor -- making insufficient accomodation for those with insufficient means -- there's the issue of assuming the best, or assuming a continuation of the past -- of making insufficient accomodation, period.

It certainly feels like catastrophes are ramping up lately; and there's some reason to believe that a couple centuries of massively changing the biosphere produces an increase in dramatic events.

Now, these two things -- the latest catastrophes, and the potential catastrophes to come -- aren't necessarily connected: no one has suggested that global warming causes tsunamis. (Though it may make hurricanes more likely, by pumping more energy into the tropics). But maybe -- so far -- the catastrophes we're seeing are pretty much business as usual; there are always catastrophes.

But I'm just thinking that, on current trends, this is just a preview for New Orleans -- and Bangladesh, and Holland, and Venice, and so on. New Orleans is living on land that's sort of crazy to live on in the face of a surely rising ocean.

We seem so stretched and underprepared for this one --- I'm just wondering what it's going to look like if and when ten of these events are happening simultaneously, in an environment where a hugely interconnected and optimized energy, transportation, and information network operating at peak performance is absolutely necessary for a world with essentially too little topsoil, too little potable water (salinated aquifiers, depleted wetlands, rivers poisoned by agricultural runoff), and too few wild food sources (largely collapsed fisheries) for its human population.

Bangladesh has been doing this every couple years, for the last couple decades. Also, Haiti and Honduras. Diamond's book does apply, because these are the effects of uncontrollable poverty and deforestation.

In the case of New Orleans, it wasn't rising sea levels that doomed the city so much as the city's sinking, or the Gulf's waters getting hotter. Although the NY Times claims global warming has nothing to do with this...

Did you know, in Angkor they paved the streambeds?

Then overpopulation and bad water management practices overwhelmed them, and the Khmer were forced to abandon a city that covered 120 square miles to the Siamese invaders.

Wow.

They paved the streambeds in Switzerland, too, and they've just unpaved them in Basel. I was walking along a tributary of the Rhine on a visit last month, and I was like "wait-- something's different here". The stream used to be sheathed in concrete, now it's been (quite amazingly) restored to grassy knolls and tree roots....

That's what I like about the Angkor streams: they're such a beautiful mixture of jungle greenery, tree roots, and highly decorative carvings. There's more pictures in that set linked up there, by the way, images of deities and waterfalls and things.

I don't get it. What's the motivation for paving waterways at all?

Clarification: the email in question that was allegedly from a rescue worker (and I have no reason to doubt that the writer of the email was a rescue worker) is all about rescue attempts and what things are like in New Orleans. The email itself doesn't say anything about plans for poor people.

What David M quoted was the introduction to that email, written by Ned Sublette (a friend of BoingBoinger Xeni Jardin). Ned doesn't claim to be a rescue worker. Part of my negative reaction to Ned's introduction is that it uses a compelling and sad account of what was going on to further Ned's political agenda. Even though I have a lot of sympathy for that agenda, I thought his choice of platform was inappropriate. I was a little annoyed with Xeni for giving Ned's comments so much prominence relative to the email, too. I'd have posted the email first, and Ned's mostly unrelated commentary either afterward or in a separate posting.

(Note that I'm not saying it was inappropriate for David M to repost Ned's introduction, nor for us to discuss it; just that I think it was inappropriate for Ned and Xeni to associate Ned's comments so strongly with the rescue-worker's email.)

Sorry, I know y'all have moved on to other stuff (and that other stuff is fascinating; I just don't have anything to contribute at the moment), but I wanted to add a calmer followup to my comments from yesterday.

David wrote:

It’s probably stupid to even try to hash this stuff out now. I’m sure there will be plenty of public hearings and recriminations later.

Yeah. Sad but true.

I didn't mean to be as vehement as I probably sounded yesterday, btw. I think I was mostly distressed that so many people (not here in your journal, but in the blogosphere and the mediascape in general) seemed to be leaping to pin blame on whoever they were already unhappy with. And I'm always knee-jerk skeptical of anything that seems to me to suggest there was one monolithic cause for a particular sequence of events. So I think I was reacting more to what I was seeing elsewhere than to the specifics of the stuff y'all were talking about.

I agree that there should have been better plans in place. And the stuff I've been seeing about funding having been cut for various disaster-preparation programs does sound pretty damning.

Kam's been taking various emergency-preparedness classes out here; I'll have to ask her if she knows about plans for dealing with CA urban centers in the event of a major quake. Though that's different; there'll be even less warning.

I just read somewhere that until Friday or so, nobody thought Katrina was going to be a serious problem for New Orleans; they didn't know it would be so big or so close. Don't know whether that's true. And even if so, it doesn't excuse the lack of preparedness; the "category-5 hurricane hits New Orleans" scenario was not something nobody had ever thought could happen. But if it's true that nobody thought Katrina was a problem 'til Friday, it might help explain a little of why things went the way they did.

I think I was mostly distressed that so many people (not here in your journal, but in the blogosphere and the mediascape in general) seemed to be leaping to pin blame on whoever they were already unhappy with.

I blame SFWA’s anti-copyleft faction!

I stand corrected. (As if I haven't learned the lesson about cautious optimism enough times.)

It’s still better than wild pessimism.

Wild pessimism sounds like more fun. And sometimes you might get to be cautiously surprised.