Our crystal ball (aka TWC) only fortold that the Gulf Coast would be hit,
not NO specifically. The point is that little or no pre-landfall
preparation seems to have taken place. A few water trucks and a thousand
dollars worth of paper cups at the superdome would have gone a long way as
would a couple of large generators and a diesel truck to fuel them (all
availible at the local equipment rental company). There are people who's
job is to think of this stuff and they had decades to think it through. I
find their performance unsatisfactory. The outcome of a levee breach at NO
has been feature on almost every hurricane show I have ever watched on TV.
This shouldn't have been a surprise.

Mike
MU-2


"sfb" wrote in message news:qsRRe.8105$__1.3116@trnddc07...
The NG requires food and water and trucks that use gasoline on passable
roads. You can't bring warm bodies in to help until you have the support
they need to survive. The old saying is generals win battles and the
logistics types win wars.

The northern Idaho crystal ball is pretty damn good. Maybe you could lend
it to the National Weather Service. 72 hours before Katrina hit New
Orleans it was off Naples, Florida with hurricane watches and warnings on
the west coast of Florida. She didn't even get north of the Tampa Bay
latitude until early Sunday.

"Mike Rapoport" wrote in message
ink.net...
There are shortages in some markets like Baton Rouge but its not just
gasoline, its everything. I have a partner who lived in New Orleans and
is now in Houston, here are no suitable apartments availible in Houston
or hotel rooms. There are a lot of people on the move.

I've been watching the relief effort on TV. While the front line
police/fire/ambulence/NG people are all doing great things, the planning
authorities really f*cked this one up. If I was expecting ten thousand
or more people to show up somewhere and expected them to stay for more
than a couple of hours, I would at least have plenty of water on hand.
If I had ten thousand people without food or water and I had to move
them, I wouldn't take two days to get started and I wouldn't delay the
evacuation to put FEMA and US flag stickers on the buses first. If I had
tens of thousands of people without food, water, sanitation and without
law enforcement, I wouldn't activate the NG one unit at a time, I would
activate them all at once and try to borrow units from neighboring states
too. Even us dopes in N Idaho knew the Gulf Coast was going to get
pasted several days beforehand. Why does it seem that it was too
complicated for the city/state/federal professionaly to figure out what
to do?

Mike
MU-2


"john smith" wrote in message
news
nrp wrote:
At least fuel is still available.

Hmmm??? Kinda makes one wonder if there really is a shortage, doesn't
it?
If there were truely a shortage nationwide, wouldn't you expect many
stations to be closed?
How many gas stations in your area are closed because they cannot get
gas?