AP: Experts say it didn't have to be this way

(edited to add the URL)

Experts say it didn't have to be this way

By Matt Crenson, Associated Press
LA Daily News

9/3/05

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On morning news shows, Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Mike Brown tried to explain that lawlessness, poor communication and the sheer scope of the catastrophe had all hindered relief efforts, but that help was on the way. Still, it has been widely known for years that New Orleans could be rendered uninhabitable by a major hurricane. So why has the response to Hurricane Katrina been so inadequate?

A big part of the problem has simply been "an inability to imagine the situation," said Shirley Laska, a sociologist with the University of New Orleans Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology. It is not clear what plans federal emergency management officials had in the event of the kind of disaster that hit New Orleans. They approached the aftermath of Katrina the same way they would any other major hurricane relief operation.

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Local authorities should have conducted a staged evacuation, starting with the most critical hospital patients and then to less vulnerable groups, he said. As it was, doctors, nurses and patients at two of the city's three downtown hospitals were still waiting to be rescued Friday. The hundreds of people still trapped in the facilities had run out of food and water, and hospital staffers were keeping themselves nourished with intravenous sugar solutions. Dead bodies were being piled in stairwells.

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After Hurricane Georges barely missed New Orleans in 1998, there was talk of using city buses to evacuate New Orleans residents without cars. But apparently that proposal never developed into an executable plan.

The mayor recommended that people trapped in New Orleans during a major hurricane take shelter in the Superdome. But the stadium was never intended as a full-scale relief center; there were no stocks of food or water. Nor was there an official plan for the evacuation of the Superdome in the event that the city was inundated and uninhabitable, or for the evacuation of anybody who did not leave the city before the storm.

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Peacock also faulted an increased concentration by FEMA on terrorism, at the expense of natural disasters.

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http://www2.dailynews.com/news/ci_2997110

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