Criticism of Government Response To Hurricane Katrina - Evacuation Process Criticism

Evacuation Process Criticism

New Orleans was already one of the poorest metropolitan areas in the United States in 2005, with the eighth-lowest median income ($30,771). At 24.5 percent, Orleans Parish had the sixth-highest poverty rate among U.S. counties or county equivalents. The 2000 U.S. census revealed that 27% of New Orleans households, amounting to approximately 120,000 people, were without private mobility. Despite these factors preventing many people from being able to evacuate on their own, the mandatory evacuation called on August 28 made no provisions to evacuate homeless, low-income, or carless individuals or sick, nor the city's elderly or infirm residents. Consequentially most of those stranded in the city were the poor, the elderly, and the sick.

It has been stated in the evacuation order that, beginning at noon on August 28 and running for several hours, all city buses were redeployed to shuttle local residents to, "refuges of last resort," designated in advance, including the Louisiana Superdome. They also said that the state had prepositioned enough food and water to supply 15,000 citizens with supplies for three days, the anticipated waiting period before FEMA would arrive in force and provide supplies for those still in the city. Later, it was found that FEMA had provided these supplies, but that FEMA Director Michael D. Brown was greatly surprised by the much larger numbers of people who turned up seeking refuge and that the first wave of supplies were quickly depleted. The large numbers were a direct result of the insufficient mobilization and evacuation before Katrina's arrival, primarily due to city and state resistance to issuing an evacuation order and risk "crying wolf" and losing face should the hurricane had left the path of model prediction. Had contra-flow on highways been initiated sooner and more buses begun evacuating families (including the idle school buses that were not used at all) the numbers of stranded New Orleans occupants would have been significantly less making the initial wave of FEMA supplies adequate and even excessive.