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Hmmm, that's pretty interesting. From the sounds of it, they weren't really aware of how severe the storm was going to be until it was too late:
August 27th:
| quote: | | Katrina is a Category 3 storm, predicted to become Category 4. At 4pm CDT, it is still 380 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. |
August 28th:
| quote: | 1 a.m. - Katrina is upgraded to a Category 4 storm with wind speeds reaching 145 mph.
7 a.m. - Katrina is upgraded to a "potentially catastrophic" Category 5 storm. NOAA predicts "coastal storm surge flooding of 15 to 20 feet above normal tide levels."
9:30 a.m. - With wind speeds reaching 175 mph, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin orders a mandatory evacuation of the city after speaking with Bush. The evacuation call comes only 20 hours before Katrina would make landfall – less than half the time that researchers had determined was necessary to evacuate the city.
10 a.m. - NOAA raises their estimate of storm surge flooding to 18 to 22 feet above normal tide levels. The levee protecting New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain is only 17.5 feet tall; the Mississippi River levee reaches 23 feet. |
So the storm's basically gone from category 3, to category 4, to category 5 in the space of 24 hours, they called the evacuation too late as a result and didn't find out until after they'd ordered it just how much danger the levees were actually in of being breached. I suppose that the question here is, should they have expected the worst and called a costly evacuation before it was absolutely clear just how severe the storm was going to be, or were they justified in waiting for so long? If "they" waited for too long, is it FEMA who should receive the blame (as they were the ones "in control" at the time according to this piece) or the mayor, as he was the one who called for the eventual evacuation?
In any case, it seems fairly clear that the handling of the crisis for the next week was pretty poor at all levels of government. No-one seemed to be properly informed on the severity of the situation and no-one really seemed to clear on who was supposed to be doing what. The fact that they kept the Red Cross out of there for so long, even when it was clear that the current rescue efforts were insufficient, is pretty damning though (the blame here rests on the shoulders of the state government, rather than the federal one).
Hopefully an independent investigation is allowed to proceed and we'll have all these questions answered with a bit more certainty.
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Katrina: What Happened When
