New Orleans Evacuation

Has Ray Nagin over learned his lesson? Ray's recent rhetoric has been over the top concerning hurricane Gustav. He's called Gustav the mother of all hurricanes, storm of the century", and one that is 900 miles wide. Huh? Well, I guess in light of his Katrina failures, maybe a little exaggeration on this hurricane is understandable. In the meantime, everyone OUT of New Orleans!  

Residents of New Orleans were ordered to flee an only partially rebuilt New Orleans Sunday as another monster storm bore down on Louisiana nearly three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina wiped out entire swaths of the city. Hurricane Gustav, which already killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean, strengthened quickly into a Category 4 and was poised to become a Category 5 storm, packing winds in excess of 156 mph. It slammed Cuba's tobacco-growing western tip before moving away from the island country into the Gulf of Mexico.

But then again, Gustav could face some wind shear as it reaches the Northern Gulf, fizzle out into a Category 2 and do next to no damage to New Orleans.....and then Ray gets criticized for doing the opposite of what he did with Katrina.

The mandatory evacuation of the city's west bank, where levee improvements remain incomplete, was to begin at 8 a.m., with the east bank to follow at noon. It's the first test of a revamped evacuation plan designed to eliminate the chaos, looting and death that followed Katrina. The city won't offer emergency services to those who choose stay behind, Nagin said, and there will be no "last resort" shelter as there was during Katrina, when thousands suffered inside a squalid Superdome. The city said in a news release that those not on their property after the mandatory evacuation started would be subject to arrest.

Talk about tough talk! But, many residents didn't need to be ordered, with an estimated 1 million people fleeing the Gulf Coast on Saturday by bus, train, plane and car. They clogged roadways, emptied gas stations of fuel and jammed phone circuits. Sometimes one is damned when they do and damned when they don't. Ray Nagin may just discover that, but then again, he might find redemption as well.

Now we wait!