| Bev |
| (Weather Guru) |
| Sun Aug 28 2005 02:39 AM |
|
Re: New Orleans Prepares for Katrina
|
Quote:Quote:
It's going to be a long day tomorrow, watching, waiting, and praying.
... and evacuating... sigh... since I am now under mandatory evacuation order by noon tomorrow. I don't understand why St. Tammany Parish south of I-12 is under mandatory order, but Orleans Parish is still only suggested.
I recently read some of the scientific papers written on the difficulties of evacuating Louisiana. It was interesting and somewhat frightening.
They implement incremental mandatory evacuations in order to allow as many people out as possible without causing gridlock. i.e. Mandatory for this area causes x number of cars on x number of roads. Those should be lessening within x hours, so implement next mandatory. So on and so forth. The problem is that in order to evacuate New Orleans successfully it requires 72 hours, which at this point, we don't have.
No easy answers. Should officials call early and often for evacuation when a storm has even a small chance of hitting within 72 hours and risk the "crying wolf" reaction to creep into the populace' mindset or should they wait until 48 hours as they have in this instance and risk losing some who will be unable to escape?
-Bev