Out of curiosity, what type of evacuation plans exist for your municipality?
Are all of the community aware of them? (Are you aware of them?)
Do they have the means to implement them if necessary? (How many rely on
public transportation?)

Just asking.




"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
oups.com...
No disrespect intended Gunner but I think you need to spend a few days
on a roof in New Orleans with no water and food and then reconsider the
subject....I think your opinion would change.

The Feds HAVE dropped the ball BIG TIME.

I see that the White House has now decided that maybe they should make
a quick trip to New Orleans for PR.

Meanwhile New Orleans burns...

TMT

===


Depot Explodes Over Lawless New Orleans By ALLEN G. BREED, Associated
Press Writer

An explosion at a chemical depot jolted residents awake early Friday,
illuminating the pre-dawn sky with red and orange flames over a city
awash in corpses and under siege from looters. There were no immediate
reports of injuries.

Vibrations from the blast along the Mississippi River and a few miles
east of the French Quarter were felt all the way downtown. A series of
smaller blasts followed and then a cyclone of acrid, black smoke.

To jittery residents of New Orleans, it was yet another fearful sight
in a city that has deteriorated rapidly since Katrina slammed ashore
Monday morning.

Congress was rushing through a $10.5 billion aid package, the Pentagon
promised 1,400 National Guardsmen a day to stop the looting and
President Bush planned to visit the region Friday. But city officials
were seething with anger about what they called a slow federal response
following Hurricane Katrina.

"They don't have a clue what's going on down there," Mayor Ray Nagin
told WWL-AM Thursday night.

"They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over
with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn - excuse my French
everybody in America, but I am ****ed."

Seeking to deflect rising criticism of the federal response, Michael
Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said
Friday: "In this catastrophic event, everything that we had
pre-positioned and ready to go became overwhelmed immediately after the
storm."

Thursday saw thousands being evacuated by bus to Houston from the hot
and stinking Superdome. Fistfights and fires erupted amid a seething
sea of tense, suffering people who waited in a lines that stretched a
half-mile to board yellow school buses. The looting continued.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco called the looters "hoodlums" and issued a warning
to lawbreakers: Hundreds of National Guard troops hardened on the
battlefield in Iraq have landed in New Orleans.

"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," she said. "These
troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do
so, and I expect they will."

At the Superdome, group of refugees broke through a line of heavily
armed National Guardsmen in a scramble to get on to the buses.

Nearby, about 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at New
Orleans Convention Center grew ever more hostile after waiting for
buses for days amid the filth and the dead.

Police Chief Eddie Compass said there was such a crush around a squad
of 88 officers that they retreated when they went in to check out
reports of assaults.

"We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are
getting beaten," Compass said. "Tourists are walking in that direction
and they are getting preyed upon."

By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the
Superdome, the arena held 10,000 more people than it did at dawn.
Evacuees from across the city swelled the crowd to about 30,000 because
they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town.

Some of those among the mostly poor crowd had been in the dome for four
days without air conditioning, working toilets or a place to bathe. One
military policeman was shot in the leg as he and a man scuffled for the
MP's rifle. The man was arrested.

By late Thursday, the flow of refugees to the Houston Astrodome was
temporarily halted with a population of 11,325, less than half the
estimated 23,000 people expected.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced that Dallas would host 25,000 more
refugees at Reunion Arena and 25,000 others would relocate to a San
Antonio warehouse at KellyUSA, a city-owned complex that once was home
to an Air Force base. Houston estimated as many as 55,000 people who
fled the hurricane were staying in area hotels.

The blasts early Friday rocked a chemical storage facility along the
river, said Lt. Michael Francis of the Harbor Police. At least two
police boats could be seen at the scene and a hazardous material team
was on route. Francis did not have any other information.

While floodwaters in New Orleans appeared to stabilize, efforts
continued to plug three breaches that had opened up in the levee system
that was designed to protect this below-sea-level city.

Helicopters dropped sandbags into the breach and pilings were being
pounded into the mouth of the canal Thursday to close its connection to
Lake Pontchartrain.

At least seven bodies were scattered outside the convention center, a
makeshift staging area for those rescued from rooftops, attics and
highways. The sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or
medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement.

A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several
times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the
choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd
from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.

"There's a lot of very sick people - elderly ones, infirm ones -
who can't stand this heat, and there's a lot of children who don't have
water and basic necessities to survive on," said Daniel Edwards, 47,
outside the center. "We need to eat, or drink water at the very least."


An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry
babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead
in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside
her wrapped in a sheet.

"I don't treat my dog like that," Edwards said as he pointed at the
woman in the wheelchair. "You can do everything for other countries,
but you can't do nothing for your own people."

Brown said the agency just learned about the situation at the
convention center Thursday and quickly scrambled to provide food, water
and medical care and remove the corpses.

The slow response frustrated Nagin: "I have no idea what they're doing
but I will tell you this: God is looking down on all this and if
they're not doing everything in their power to save people, they are
going to pay the price because every day that we delay, people are
dying and they're dying by the hundreds."

In hopes of defusing the situation at the convention center, Nagin gave
the evacuees permission to march across a bridge to the city's
unflooded west bank for whatever relief they could find.

A day after Nagin took 1,500 police officers off search-and-rescue duty
to try to restore order in the streets, there were continued reports of
looting, shootings, gunfire and carjackings.

Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Mich., said she asked a police
officer for assistance and his response was, "'Go to hell - it's
every man for himself.'"

FEMA officials said some operations had to be suspended in areas where
gunfire has broken out, but they are working overtime to feed people
and restore order.

Outside a looted Rite-Aid drugstore, some people were anxious to show
they needed what they were taking. A gray-haired man who would not give
his name pulled up his T-shirt to show a surgery scar and explained
that he needs pads for incontinence.

"I'm a Christian," he said. "I feel bad going in there."

Hospitals struggled to evacuate critically ill patients who were dying
for lack of oxygen, insulin or intravenous fluids. But when some
hospitals try to airlift patients, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri
Ben-Iesan said, "there are people just taking potshots at police and at
helicopters, telling them, `You better come get my family.'"

To make matters worse, the chief of the Louisiana State Police said he
heard of numerous instances of New Orleans police officers - many of
whom from flooded areas - turning in their badges.

"They indicated that they had lost everything and didn't feel that it
was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their
lives," Col. Henry Whitehorn said.

Mississippi's confirmed death toll from Katrina rose to 126 on Thursday
as more rescue teams spread out into a sea of rubble to search for the
living, their efforts complicated at one point by the threat of a
thunderstorm.

All along the 90-mile coast, other emergency workers performed the
grisly task of retrieving corpses, some of them lying on streets and
amid the ruins of obliterated homes that stretch back blocks from the
beach.

Gov. Haley Barbour said he knows people are tired, hungry, dirty and
scared - particularly in areas hardest hit by Katrina. He said the
state faces a long and expensive recovery process.

"I will say, sometimes I'm scared, too," Barbour said during a briefing
in Jackson, Miss. "But we are going to hitch up our britches. We're
going to get this done."