"Forecasters are saying that Hurricane Georges could hit New Orleans with 115 mile an hour winds. Thousands packed up and moved out, clogging evacuation routes."
And that taught everybody a troubling lesson. Joe Suhayda, the scientist with the big stick, drives me through the city to explain.
"Well, Hurricane Georges was one for which the track had the potential of flooding the city. So the people were given a mandatory order to evacuate the city," says Suhayda.
And government officials had made elaborate plans so the population could evacuate smoothly. We keep passing bluestreet signs marked Hurricane Evacuation Route. The government had organized fleets of busses, to rescue tens-of-thousands of people who didn't have cars. At the last minute, Hurricane Georges faded to a weaker storm and it veered away, which was lucky. Because the evacuation was a fiasco.
"And what happened to the people that did evacuate is that they got into massive traffic jams and many of them spent the worst part of the hurricane either on the highway—stopped— or had pulled off to the side of the road," remembers Suhayda.
Now supposing the hurricane had really walloped New Orleans? Here are all of these thousands and thousands of people in their cars trapped on the side of the road. What would happen to them?
"Many of our evacuation routes are subject to flooding," says Suhayda. "And they would be washed away, and there would be really no way for help—that is the emergency services people—to get to them to help them."
That's from "Hurricane Risk for New Orleans," Part III of the September 2002 documentary Nature's Revenge: Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands, produced by American RadioWorks, a joint project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News.
This only happens when people are unprepared. Many people forget that pretty much all of the tough choices.
Posted by: tv penny auctions | August 31, 2011 at 12:55 PM