Sorry for the long delay in posting your comments. With this blog system, I have to approve each comment individually, and I was otherwise occupied for several hours.

The most respected voices in the blogosphere never respond to critics who aren’t capable of voicing intelligent criticism. You have the potential to eventually be one of them, so you might as well start having that attitude now.

I don’t make personal attacks, sanssoucy, but your comment makes you sound like a bit of a wanker. Perhaps you should rephrase to avoid misunderstanding.

No, Glenn; it IS encouraging. It seems to me that Nagin is older and wiser than he was then. He’s had many years to reflect on his mistakes, and he has a better staff than he did in ‘05. I give him credit for leaving the convention early to come back home if nothing else.

Sorry if it seems a bit harsh, I cannot resist. There is much truth to my barb. Thankfully, it is less true this time than it was for past hurricane threats to the Big Easy.

You hopeless dimwit. The whole south part of the state has been doing a “phased” evacuation for decades. Grand Isle et al leaves in phase one. Then Houma etc, THEN the metro area.

Decade brother decades. Look it up. This is nothing new.

>If everybody leaves all at once, in contravention of that plan, I imagine there would be some potential for Rita-like evacuation problems.

YA THINK? YOU IMAGINE?

And THIS you twit, is why your crowing for the last 3 years that you said people should leave early is so gawd damn annoying to those of us know a little bit about Emergency Management.

Read my lips. YOU WHERE DEAD WRONG.

As you might remember a large hunk of the city evacuates to this town called Houston. What happens if we evacuate the New Orleans early and the storm turns west?

Now we have a half a million people out of place AND the whole city of Houston to worry about.

Not to mention New Orleans takes up every hotel room for a circle greater than 200 miles in diameter. If it moved east (as it was predicted for a long time before the NHC moved the track almost 250 miles in 12 hours) nobody on the Gulf Coast could have gotten a hotel room for 300 miles.

That would have made for a pretty evacuation for the million or so people there.

>>>epic display of gross incompetence???

Look in the freaking mirror. You have no idea how to properly manage an emergency. The only reason you got your 15 minutes of fame is because a floodwall failed prematurely. (read that sentence 3 times. yes, only a freak accident made you not look like an idiot)

If the floodwall worked as it was supposed to you would have grossly damaged emergency response in the area in the future.

WHY? Because, chicken little, you don’t freaking “push the get the hell out button” every time you see a hurricane. If you do that the population gets the idea evacuations are a waste of time. Then when a real storm is coming they ignore you.

Don’t you understand any of this?

Where’s another thing you don’t understand. — The evacuation was a stunning success. — Yes, I said a stunning success. The metro New Orleans area is about a million people. About another million people live south of them. (and as we discussed need to leave first)

Of those 2 million people they had about 20,000 go to the “shelter of last resort” and another 10,000 or so shelter in place. — That’s the largest and fastest mobilization of human beings in the history of mankind. — no joke. They moved roughly 2 million people and all their possessions hundreds of miles in just about 48 hours. Let’s see another part of the world do that.

We saw what happened when Houston tried to evacuate.

Please, stick to pretending to be sports critic or whatever it is you do and leave emergency management to people who are trained to do it.

Yes, the email is real. I have it for a reason. Feel free to use it and tell me how much smarter you are than every emergency planner in the country. We all need lessons from you.

10 bucks says you delete this.