Follow-on to the Elephant : Nagin speaks!

OK, so now I guess I know why the New Orleans situation has been such a mess. Check out this interview with the mayor (requires Windows Media Player, me thinks):

http://mmslb.eonstreams.com/b/ccri/cc_corporate/cc_news/nagin.wma

'Nuf said about the mayor ... he is WAY too easy of a target.

"But wait a minute Reinhard ... now you are sounding awful liberal ... all complaining and whining but no solutions. What would you have done?"

Ooops, sorry about that. Let me qualify this with the fact that I do not actually know the city that well ... so my points will be based on some primary criteria:
a) large areas of the city would be flooded if the levies give way (they have been whispering this for years, but last year it became "real" with Ivan)
b) many houses and "low end" structures would not handle the impact of a storm.
c) New Orleans is a corrupt hellhole full of a lot of very bad people.

Assumptions:
1) In the worst case, one or more of the systems would fail and there would be serious floods in the city (note: this is what all the doom-n-gloomers were guessing every time a storm got near N.O.)
2) In all storms, despite all the urgency you can put into your voice, some folks are going to ride it out. Bad guys were going to intentionally stick around to get what they could.
3) Lots of the poor folks with no transportation will have no way of getting out
4) (most controversial) New Orleans has 3x the murder rate and 2-4x the property crime rate of LA ... it should have been pretty obvious to competent local leaders that at least the possibility of unbelievable violence existed.

OK ... with assumption 1 (flooding), as a local leader you must get your critical assets away from the city. I am going to guess that somewhere in or around New Orleans, there are a boatload of school and city buses under about 10 feet of water. I will also guess that there are dozens or hundreds of city and state vehicles drowned in the mess. They needed to load those all up on Saturday and Sunday and headed as far west as was required to save the vehicles. Done right, they could have loaded some evacuees on there as well, and as many supplies as you could drag out of the city. I won't debate the trivial stuff, but you had to assume that anything IN THE CITY would be lost and that preserving these assets was critical. The governor could have suspended laws regulating special drivers licenses (normally required to drive these vehicles) so that just about anybody could volunteer to drive the rigs. A really good mayor would have had a few seminars to select and certify the drivers, but we are talking New Orleans here.

Next, whatever facilities you were going to use to "ride out the storm", like the Superdome, had to be prepped. You were going to need water, food (MREs), sanitary systems (assume sewer is not functioning), non-electrical lighting, etc. Most important, you were going to need people who could facilitate all of this and make it happen. I worked in an arena in college, so I know it takes a lot to make it all work. This was NOT something you could pull off at the last minute with people that didn't know what the hell they were doing ... it required prep, it required practice drills ... this was going to have to all work in virtual chaos WITH THE LIGHTS OUT! Again, Ivan happened a year ago, so in my mind Nagin and the governor had a year to prepare.

Finally, you had to have staged massive national guard forces and police outside the city, ready to come in ("Hello Governor Blanco? Where the hell were you this last year?"). Just a general look at the crime statistics could tell any reasonable person that all hell was going to break loose once the bad guys figured the cops were overwhelmed. Pre-storm evacuation notices should have included warnings that police and national guard outfits were going to secure the city with zero tolerance for any problems. Note: you had to have prepared to handle BOTH law enforcement AND rescue. This had to be prepared for ... not thrown together on the fly once the chaos broke loose. For the whining liberals that decried the fact that the feds didn't do it ... this would be illegal (even today), the state controlled National Guard has this authority, not the feds.

Now, I came up with this in about 10 minutes. Are you really going to tell me that people whose job this is could not have done this in two or three brain-storming sessions?