Hurricane Warning Up Morgan City, LA to FL/Alabama Border

Actually, perhaps not, and I have made a couple posts about this the past day. You know I have a brother who works in Jackson Cty law enforcement. For some reason they don't even enforce mandatory evac and I am not sure of the reason. Time after time officials drag their feet as far as evac and if you hear from Kissy on the board tomorrow she will tell you the same thing, that they never received notice to evac until too late, etc, just as with Dennis. And by the time they are told to leave, no hotel rooms, no gasoline, roads starting to flood, etc.

I know there are many many people in the county there who will never evac, period; for one, another one of my brothers that I don't speak to very often but who told me bluntly so on the phone. Why? I have no clue.

There is a terrific online web site for all 3 MS coastal counties of Hancock, Harrison, and Jackson along with very detailed flood zone maps labeled by Cat number. There were many SLOSH studies done to create these maps. At some point along the line many smart people put in a lot of time to identify what they could to help evac.

Now why the mobilization part fails I don't know.

This is why whenever a storm heads to the N GOM I go on about these things and it just gives me fits.

Now NO knew about the required 72 hours minimum for evac, and you are right the models clustered there two days ago. I guess it is the mentality that unless it is just parked right outside Lake Ponchatrain they really don't believe it is there, I don't know. If it is true that NHC personnally made a call to the mayor of NO maybe it is because they were having fits too wondering when the sam hill everyone was going to evac.

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, consider that since the severe damage swath is so small and the cone of error so wide, many people feel that the odds are against them getting the direct hit.

Do you know that when Dennis hit FL, that many people who evac from Jackson Cty returned to find their homes looted. The reason why was that because of the NO evac plan, all the Jackson Cty folks who were only told to evac the last minute had to drive even as far as TX or TN to find a hotel room. It took them awhile to get back and the curfew was lifted maybe a day or two early, and enough people were still gone that crooks had a field day looting unoccupied homes. I know that because my brother told me just how many robberies he had to take care of the next couple days after Dennis (it was under 100, but way up in the double digits). So nobody wants to leave their home knowing that it could be looted before they could come back.

People would evac more readily if there was a safe place a couple of hours away, where they could get home fairly quickly afterwards, after the roads had been cleared.

Now people can't even be sure if they get a little ways out of the county on these back roads, spending hours stuck in traffic jams (it took on average six hours to leave Jackson Cty for Ivan to get just as far as places like Hattiesburg or Jackson), because there are no freeways, that they'll be able to get gas and keep on going. Chances are they could be stuck in their car out in the open, not too far away, where there is danger from winds once the storm has struck.

Finally, a lot of these people don't have a lot of money. Evacuating costs them a lot: food, gas (more, because of the slow traffic), hotel.

The population is so large that it seems there is no reasonable solution to this evac issue.

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Katrina's Surge: http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/Katrinas_surge_contents.asp

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