Mayor of New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation. The problem with evacuating a major metropolis such as New Orleans or Houston, as has been said on here by people with firsthand knowledge, is that many people don't have the means to leave or anywhere to go. I can provide links if necessary
I stand corrected he ordered the evacuation less than a day before land fall, he failed his constituents
"New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was also criticized for failing to implement his food plan and for ordering residents to a shelter of last resort without any provisions for food, water, security, or sanitary conditions. Perhaps the most important criticism of Nagin is that he delayed his emergency evacuation order until less than a day before landfall, which led to hundreds of deaths of people who (by that time) could not find any way out of the city.[SUP]
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Adding to the criticism was the broadcast of school bus parking lots full of yellow school buses, which Mayor Nagin refused to be used in evacuation. When asked why the buses were not used to assist evacuations instead of holing up in the Superdome, Nagin cited the lack of insurance liability and shortage of bus drivers.[SUP]
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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.[SUP]
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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 sick individuals, nor the city's elderly or infirm residents. Consequently, 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.[SUP]
[6][/SUP] 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.[SUP]
[6][/SUP] 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.[SUP]
[6][/SUP] The large number of deaths were a result of the insufficient response and evacuation before Katrina's arrival, primarily due to city and state resistance to issuing an evacuation order and risking "crying wolf" and losing face should the hurricane have 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.
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